Metal finishing Q&As since 1989

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Can ElectroPolish Bath be used for Electro Plating

January 9, 2009

We have a bath that used to be used to Electro Polish Stainless Steel.

If we change the electrolyte and put a basket of nickel sulfamate pellets where the steel used to go and put mandrels where the cathodes had been before, could we electroplate nickel on to steel using the same bath.

The bath can produce DC voltage from 0 to 12 Volts and DC Amps from 0 to 200. We only need 70 amps to do our plating.

The bottom line question would be are electro plating and electropolishing baths basically the same.

Ronald Tripp
- Johnson City, NY, USA

Hi, Ronald. There is a semantics issue here that may confuse things. To many people in the industry, "the bath" will mean the process chemistry / the solution / the electrolyte. To you it seems to mean the "the tank", i.e., the hardware as opposed to the aqueous solution.

There is probably no reason the tank cannot be converted to hold a nickel plating solution, but it would probably be impractical to try to formulate a nickel plating solution which used an old electropolishing solution as its base.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
January 13, 2009