Adventures in Alchemy
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First try at plating today. Pleased with the results. Not cheaper to do this yourself on a big pile of small parts, but I wanted to do it and show the kids. $555 bucks in stuff here. $255 in kit from Caswell, roughly $200 for cheap power supply, and $100 bucks in pots, thermometers, alligator clips and the like.
Basically it goes like this, sand or bead blast your parts so they are spotless. Degrease them in a darn near boiling degreaser powder/water mix (from Caswell), Mix up a solution that if I had to guess is mostly vinegar and salt (from Caswell) in distilled or RO water. Circulate the solution with an aquarium pump and heat the solution to 110 degrees F. Hang two zinc plates in it, (also from Caswell), and hook the positive lead of a constant current DC power supply to the zinc. Hang your steel parts that you are plating from copper wire from a copper tube and hook the negative lead from the power supply to that. You run .14 amp/square inch through the parts for 20 minutes. You are basically putting the positively charged zinc in solution and depositing it on your negatively charged steel. The pulley cages took 1 amp total, and the flap hinges took 6 amp total. I had the voltage set at a max of 12V, but in reality, it doesn't take near that much. The amps are what drive and regulate the process, so a power supply with constant current is what you want. Most of the switching power supplies have both CV and CC. I would not recommend the one I have pictured here. It is of poor quality. I have used it twice and had to fix it both times before using it. It did not come from Caswell.
After parts are plated with zinc, rinse them with distilled water, and dip them in the yellow chromate/distilled water solution at 80 degrees for 30 seconds to give them the cadmium color. Rinse again and let dry.
You rinse the parts back to the buckets you did the last process from to keep from contaminating your baths and wasting materials. You cover the buckets with gasketed lids until next time.
The stainless pots have water in them to heat the solution in the plastic buckets. Tank heaters that won't contaminate the process are expensive. This old range from my wife's parents was free 23 years ago and I use it for heating 7018 rod, making jerky, and now plating. It will also bake cookies and cook pizza!
You can homebrew the elixirs and buy the zinc from somewhere other than Caswell. If you did this I'm sure you could do this lots cheaper than what I have done, but I didn't want to do that on these parts and I figured I didn't need to complicate things on my first try.
The only semi-nasty stuff is the chromate or color. It is an etching acid. Keep it off your soft and tender parts. I'd compare it to battery acid. Have a fan going, don't be stupid with it.
You can make these parts shiny with a brightener in the plating bath, but I opted to leave them dull like what I think of with true cad. From what I read the zinc does the lion's share of the protecting. The chromate does some too but is more a matter of preference.
Again, not an expert, not a professional plater. Just trying and learning new stuff by slowly building an airplane in my shop with my kids.
Lots of fun.
Thanks,
Jim
Basically it goes like this, sand or bead blast your parts so they are spotless. Degrease them in a darn near boiling degreaser powder/water mix (from Caswell), Mix up a solution that if I had to guess is mostly vinegar and salt (from Caswell) in distilled or RO water. Circulate the solution with an aquarium pump and heat the solution to 110 degrees F. Hang two zinc plates in it, (also from Caswell), and hook the positive lead of a constant current DC power supply to the zinc. Hang your steel parts that you are plating from copper wire from a copper tube and hook the negative lead from the power supply to that. You run .14 amp/square inch through the parts for 20 minutes. You are basically putting the positively charged zinc in solution and depositing it on your negatively charged steel. The pulley cages took 1 amp total, and the flap hinges took 6 amp total. I had the voltage set at a max of 12V, but in reality, it doesn't take near that much. The amps are what drive and regulate the process, so a power supply with constant current is what you want. Most of the switching power supplies have both CV and CC. I would not recommend the one I have pictured here. It is of poor quality. I have used it twice and had to fix it both times before using it. It did not come from Caswell.
After parts are plated with zinc, rinse them with distilled water, and dip them in the yellow chromate/distilled water solution at 80 degrees for 30 seconds to give them the cadmium color. Rinse again and let dry.
You rinse the parts back to the buckets you did the last process from to keep from contaminating your baths and wasting materials. You cover the buckets with gasketed lids until next time.
The stainless pots have water in them to heat the solution in the plastic buckets. Tank heaters that won't contaminate the process are expensive. This old range from my wife's parents was free 23 years ago and I use it for heating 7018 rod, making jerky, and now plating. It will also bake cookies and cook pizza!
You can homebrew the elixirs and buy the zinc from somewhere other than Caswell. If you did this I'm sure you could do this lots cheaper than what I have done, but I didn't want to do that on these parts and I figured I didn't need to complicate things on my first try.
The only semi-nasty stuff is the chromate or color. It is an etching acid. Keep it off your soft and tender parts. I'd compare it to battery acid. Have a fan going, don't be stupid with it.
You can make these parts shiny with a brightener in the plating bath, but I opted to leave them dull like what I think of with true cad. From what I read the zinc does the lion's share of the protecting. The chromate does some too but is more a matter of preference.
Again, not an expert, not a professional plater. Just trying and learning new stuff by slowly building an airplane in my shop with my kids.
Lots of fun.
Thanks,
Jim