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How can I electroplate a steel door latch (for a horse trailer I’m refurbishing)using nickles and household chemicals and a 12v auto battery
I also have a bar of pure tin if that would work
Got any duct tape?
Put what you’re going to electroplate into the solution (whatever you’re electroplating with is drawn onto the surface, put the bar of tin into the solution if you want that to be drawn). Actually first take an electrode from the negative side of the battery to what you’re going to be electroplating. Then place the steel door latch (now attatched) and place it into the solution separate from the bar of tin. Then carefully drop an electrode from the positive side into the solution. Be very careful with this! Anyway, I’m not sure exactly what should be in the solution (it depends on what you have), though it should be something conductive. This causes the tin to be broken up and drawn to steel door latch. Enjoy, but play safe.
Oh, man. I hate electrochemistry. I refuse to go look up my reduction potential tables. Sorry. I like the duct tape idea myself.
It’s McGuyver. Sorry, he was my hero when I was young.
Uh, silent rob, you’re going to get him maimed, if not killed.
justwannano, you need to regulate the current from your 12V battery, otherwise you’ll have an exploded battery and severe chemical burns.
My advice is to buy a plating kit if you’re that interested in doing it yourself. They go for about $75 - $100, and you can find them lots of places online.
I would rather plate with nickel.
Sorry zion McGuyver
What do I use for a medium to carry the nickel ions Vinegar? Lemon Juice? salt water?
For around $18 you can get a silver plating solution. Yep, a silver plated hinge. Nifty.
wouldn’t it be simpler and a lot safer to have it done? The results might be better as well.
In any case, rather than use a battery, I would use a regulated DC power supply.
Just as a side thing: You an also get (pulsing) DC easily from the mains with a rectifier and a lightbulb. I have charged batteries like this. Just be careful and be sure you know what you are doing.
the circuit is like this: from the “live” wire, through a lightbulb (to limit the A), through the diode (correct polarity essential), to the + of the battery, then the - of the battery to the neutral (white) wire. By doing it this way, the battery is always at about ground potential and not a risk of shock. You can do this while the battery is in the car and overnight will give you enough to start the car in the morning. If you connect the wires wrong the whole car can be put at line voltage and can be very dangerous. Know what you are doing.
This system would also give you good DC for electroplating.
Don’t forget your swiss army knife. It is very important for all things McGuyverish.
As for the electroplating, I have no idea.
Jeffery
sorry jamshid, i was just trying to work with what he had there. my dad’s an electrician, and i asked him about this. he gave me the exact same explanation i gave. however, what i gave uses the bare minimum that justwannaknow provided. i personally would go for an electroplating kit. sorry to cause anyone any worry. if you really wanted to go it alone, I would go with what sailor suggests. but professional jobs are usually much nicer.
Are you married to electrolyte plating? In firarms electoless nickel is preferred for a more durable and corrsion resistant finish. You can get solutions for doing that from gunsmith supply houses like Brownell’s. For a one off item you’d be better off having it done for you though.
If you want to go more exotic, though not do it yourself, there is an electroless nickel finish called NP3 that forms a matrix of nickel and PTFE (Teflon™) molecules for even less friction than just nickel.
Keep in mind that any plating process requires an absolutely clean surface. Sandpaper or wire brush isn’t going to cut it. You’ll have to “pickle” in Hydrocloric acid.
I need to know a little more about the electroplating solution.
Let me see, you’d like to electroplate using U.S. 5 cent pieces, and you want to deposit Nickel?
U.S. money is not pure metallicly speaking, IIRC, Nickles, Dimes, and Quarters are a zinc-plated cupronickle sandwiches, which means 2 things:
If you attempt to electroplate from nickles, you will at best be depositing zinc, which is the outer surface. The nickle in the center is mixed with copper, and darned near useless to plate with.
Bars of pure tin are a better idea, if tin plating sounds good to you. Again, a 12 volt battery would be a pittifully poor way to electroplate: it’s impossible to regulate. I suggest a decent benchtop transformer, which can convert from AC to DC and has all sorts of neato rheostats and dials which allow you to regulate teh voltage enough. Plus, you’ll need to whip out your Chemistry text book and look up your standard reduction potentials to plan your electrodes out carefully; essentially what will be building is the exact opposite of a battery; you are using the EMF to push your substrates against the Standard Reduction gradient. there are several good procedures out there for electroplating in standard H.S. and college level chemistry lab texts. Another possiblity is to skip electroplating altogether and try chemiplating. I have some nifty brone-plated pennies I made that way.
When I was in grade school, I set up a demo of electroplating that used pennies for the plating source, quarters for the object to be plated, a solution of copper sulfate to dunk everything in, and a lantern battery for the power source. It worked slowly, but it worked. I used to have a couple of copper-plated quarters from that experiment…I wonder what ever happened to them? My brother probably stuck them in a soda machine.
Sidebar: copper sulfate is a lovely shade of robin’s egg blue.
I like the idea of nickel best. I once worked for a metal film resistor manufacturer where we used nickel wire as a filament and the film is deposited in a vacuum. The high tech method.If I look hard enough I can probably find a couple of those filaments laying around here.
I’m just doing it for the hell of it.And the conversation piece it will be.If I wanted it to be perfect I’d just buy another latch for about $5.00.
A solution of nickel sulfamate, Ni(NH[sub]2[/sub]SO[sub]3[/sub])[sub]2[/sub], is commonly used for plating nickel, but I don’t know where you can get this. To plate copper, use a solution of copper sulfate. That used to be widely available to kill tree roots that are interfering with plumbing.
Nickels are not a great source of nickel. They are something like 75 percent copper and 25 percent nickel. Modern pennies are copper plated zinc so they aren’t an ideal source of copper. If you have a large enough tank of solution and don’t plate too much, you might not need a good source of metal because there may be enough nickel already in the solution.
You can estimate how much current and time you will need to plate a given amount, since Ni[sup]2+[/sup] and Cu[sup]2+[/sup] ions in solution each require 2 electrons to plate one atom. An Amp of current is one Coulomb per second, and an electron has a charge of 1.6e-19 Coulomb.
I’m afraid you don’t quite recall correctly. Dimes, quarters and half dollars are made from that metal sandwich. However, nickels are still not useful as they are an alloy of 65% copper and 35% nickel.
To get pure nickel, go to Canada and get some of their nickels. With the exchange rate what it is, you can get twice as many for the same number of US dollars.
Pennies, too, are nickel filled. Just drop one on an electric stove and heat it up real good to see what I mean–they moosh about like one of those grilled-cheese-sandwich-maker infomercials, because the nickel melts first. In fact I’ve been wanting to ask what year is good for an all-copper penny–they have potential uses in overclocking computers.
Actually, the centers of pennies are made of zinc, not nickel. Previously, they were made of a 95% copper, 5%nickel alloy. This change was made in 1982, I think (may have been 83).