Masking material / method for electroless nickel plating

A. Hi Rajesh. Liquid maskants can work but you need a very good one because most electroless nickel processes are very hot and aggressive.

Luck & Regards,

adv.

Rajesh, we help customers with electroless nickel plating all the time. We can supply a maskant for this process. If anyone is in need of a maskant for this or any other process, please give us a call at 888-218-7227 or email us at info@maskcoat.com.

Jeremy
www.maskcoat.com

A. Hi Mohan. Masking for electrolytic nickel, unlike for electroless nickel, should be pretty easy and unchallenging for the masking material.

Apologies but I do not understand what you are saying about the material bending ... but you are not trying to heat treat AFTER nickel plating are you?

Luck & Regards,

A. adv. Please email MASKCOAT for any questions info@maskcoat.com

We have customers who use our products for electroless nickel plating on a continuing basis. We can certainly help with this.

A. Hi Emmanuel

I don't call what you are looking for 'paint'; I'd call it a maskant for electroless nickel. You can use high-temperature "plater's tape", or teflon tape if the part is suitable, or elastomer plugs or caps, or a brush-on or spray-on plastisol-type masking aid. There are several manufacturers of specialized masking materials (hopefully our advertisers will respond to you in private).

A. Hi Chris. Maskants are available from a number of suppliers Maskcoat LLC [a finishing.com supporting advertiser]. Maskants are usually applied as dip-able or brushable coatings as opposed to sprayable coatings (and as caps, plugs, & tapes). Electroless nickel is one of the more difficult plating solutions to mask against because of its high temperature, and unless you have a really good reason why spraying is very strongly preferable, I'd look to dipping or brushing (where plugs and caps can't be used).

A. SS screws will eventually become active and begin to plate out (this could also happen to nylon and is solved by stripping in nitric acid in both cases). Their mechanical resistance make them an option worth trying. In my opinion there is nothing in the conventional previous prep steps that will interfere with good plating.

A. Jeff,

You can use rubber plugs, nylon screws must be changed after you have used them.

Regards

A. Hi Przemyslaw. Sorry, we can't compare commercial products on these pages, or suggest one brand or source over another (why?), but Maskcoat LLC [a finishing.com supporting advertiser] may have a suggestion. Good luck.

Regards,

A. Hola Señor Ibarra. We added your question to a thread on the subject. It is quite difficult to mask parts for electroless nickel plating -- both because of the high temperature and the aggressiveness of the chemicals.

Personal sidenote: Polypropylene is so flammable that by far the leading cause of plating shop fires is electric heaters in polypropylene tanks. So for an exotic NASA installation I once designed a large plating shop with special fire-retardant polypropylene tanks throughout. It was a smashing success! ... except that the electroless nickel tank suffered boron relentlessly leaching into the plating solution and ruining it. So part of the "smashing success" was smashing up the fire-resistant electroless nickel tank and replacing it with a pure polypropylene one :-(

The moral is that even very small amounts of chemicals leached out can ruin the chemical balance in an electroless nickel process. So, based on the personal experience I described, if it were my electroless nickel plating tank, I would not allow any masking material to enter it except those specifically designed for the purpose.

If you do not find sufficient info on this page about appropriate proprietary masking materials, please google for "masking for electroless nickel plating".

Buena suerte,

Thank you Ted.
I will follow your advice.

A. There are a number of maskants specially designed for electroless nickel plating process. Contact your local maskant supplier and emphasize that you need a maskant for EN process.

adv.
Please email MASKCOAT for any questions info@maskcoat.com
We have customers who use our products for electroless nickel plating on a continuing basis. We can certainly help with this.

A. Hi Imran. There are other reducing agents sometimes used in electroless nickel formulations, including sodium borohydride, dimethylamine borane (DMAB) and hydrazine ... but these are whole alternate processes with different deposit properties, not a simple substitution; and all are at least as difficult to get and work with :-(

English may not be your first language, and we apologize that it is the only language we can work with here. But please try translate.google.com and give us some background information to minimize misunderstandings because a 4-word sentence fragment isn't an answerable question.

Luck & Regards,