my nickel-plating solution works ^_^

[solarbird]

My first nickel-plating! Of a piece of test wire but that's not important what's important is it works!


I did it with the solution I made myself, keeping DC below 3 amps. That meant a higher voltage than often recommended, but I had very good control over the amount of power going through the system and it was pretty even!

After a few minutes I found I'd added about 0.05mm to the wire, is around a quarter additional thickness - the bare strands are, my calipers tell me, are 0.20 to 0.22mm.

I don't know if that's a lot? But it was still going so I could've added more.

Mostly I just wanted to see if it would work and if the nickel would just fall off but it doesn't seem to, not even when I'm abusing it for the calipers. So I think that's a good sign. The wire was, importantly, factory clean in that I'd just stripped the insulation off.

Here's a close-up of the donor bar/anode, which I think is pretty. You can really see where the atoms came from! I bet I could do this a lot more evenly, if I wanted.


Anyway, VICTORY FOR TAK!

Comments

[gwydion]

Oooo!

[solarbird]

What this is mostly for is rust protection. I was on the fence about trying nickel-plating vs. bluing on a pair of old, rusty garden trimmers that I cleaned up, and went for bluing, thinking nickel plating would be too difficult and/or expensive.

Turns out, it isn't! And you can make most of it at home if you have a decent DC power supply. (Or even batteries if you have enough of them, apparently this is a Scouting thing too.) The professional solution is better, and lets you do things like pick finishes (matte, glossy) but this seems to work, so... hey, now I know it works!

(Plain white vinegar, salt, nickel to infuse, DC power. That's it.)

[gwydion]

It's not a project for me, but I always thought the process was cool.

[armiphlage]

I visited a PCB shop recently, and their source material for electroplating is in spheres, kept within a mesh sock. No idea why, it seems like bar stock would be superior both in terms of cost and control; their process engineer wasn't sure either, but said they've always done it that way.

[solarbird]

Huh.

There’s got to be some reason for that. I wonder what.

[vatine]

Multiple smaller spheres would have more surface area for a given mass, than an essentially cuboid piece of flat/bar stock. Although the flat/bar stock may have a more consistent area over time (especially flatstock, as the "wide" dimension would dominate and the "thin" would be the quickest, relatively speaking, to erode).

Although for maximal area consistency, a very thick-walled tube would be better. Get the ratio right and the surface area would stay consistent for much of the process.

And, of course, the exposed area is one parameter in how fast you can plate, as the surface is basically where the ion exchange happens.

[solarbird]

The other thing is that the side of the object being plated facing the source gets more heavily coated. You need to rotate the object you're coating, and while that's fair enough, I was thinking of setting up some sort of ring of nickel to help with that. And a sphere wouldn't solve that at all.

[vatine]

Yeah, I have vague memories of seeing plating tanks with multiple donor sources and the object-to-be-plated in the middle.

But, I am very VERY far from having any plating experience and amuse myself by trying to derive thinks from first principles. We did a little bit of, um, I think zinc-plating, of copper in chemistry in the gymnasium, but that's as far as I have played around.

[solarbird]

Yeah! Zinc is basically the same process. I just went with nickel because it's nicer looking and if I want to use it on a tool, I'd want to use nickel.

[armiphlage]

The only reason I could think of was that the mesh catches any bits that fall off, so they don't litter the bottom of the electroplating tank. Even so, it has to be cheaper to use bar stock instead of molding or machining it into spheres. Sure, the corners will erode faster - but that's not a bad thing worth spending money to prevent.

[vatine]

May still be a surface area thing. But, I would expect that in most cases the voltage and/or amperage to be the limiting factor.

[solarbird]

For best results, you need not to run the electric at highest levels anyway. The bubbles (hydrogen bubbling off) can get big enough to affect surface quality and evenness.

[vatine]

Yeah, with a well-adjusted voltage and amperage, you'll probably run out of electron migration and ionization of the donor material faster than you run out of suitable surface area.