Can you do gold/silver plating of small items at home, or do you have to send this stuff off to a specialist?
My wife wants one of these (for £195), and I reckon the parts (just M4 nuts and some elastic) are a fiver plus the cost of plating. Plus 30 mins to thread it.
Brass nuts will make the best base, but will probably need a nickel undercoat before the gold. IME it is a lot simpler to get somebody in the business to do all that than to go to the trouble of setting it up at home just for one bracelet.
Colin Bignell
Ideally, the nuts should be as light as possible. Do you think aluminium would be an option?
Not that aluminium nuts are particularly easy to find!
As the difference will be small in absolute terms, is it worth it?
Aluminium weighs 2.70 g/cm3.
Brass weighs 8.4 g/cm3
Steel weights 7.8 g/cm3
I'd guess the volume of metal in the cuff to be about 5 cm3, so 15 grammes for aluminium against 44 grammes for brass. The original will probably use steel nuts, for a weight of just under 40 grammes. The plating will weigh milligrammes. For real bling, make the nuts out of solid 9 carat gold. Only about £400 quid's worth at scrap prices., but the weight could be reduced by making the holes bigger and labour by not threading them.
Gold plating kits from £189 here:-
Errmmm... That's threading as in cutting an internal thread, not threading on the cord.
My dad used to do nickel and possibly other electroplating in his shed. All I remember was having plated door knobs on all the doors around the house and quite a lot of failures, mainly due to not being able to clean the targets well enough.
His equipment included glass tanks with bits of wood across the top from which he hung the unit to be plated, the anode (or was it cathode?) and small electric motors driving, I think, glass rods to stir the solution. There was an old car battery charger to power the motors, and perhaps the rest.
I would get a quote from a professional before trying it myself. I wonder if plating companies do part-loads like the hot-dip galvanisers, who would put my relatively small items in beside a big job if I was prepared to wait for the lower price or to catch the eye of the actual workers rather than go via the office?
Nickel plate is easy to do at home too. Gold requires more advanced chemistry to get a shiny polished layer to adhere and the classic method is a cyanide bath which is very definitely not safe at home.
I can't imagine that anyone would sell gold cyanide complex plating solution to home users. There are other chemistries but not as good.
Cleaning and degreasing the object to be plated is a non-trivial task.
Yes. It set me aback for a moment, though. :)
Plating of ally is a nightmare. Its too reactive.
Brian
You could have aluminium anodized in a gold colour, but not SFAIK gold plated.
Colin Bignell
Which illustrates my point about whether it is really worth the bother for just one bracelet.
IME Gold plating is always done in small batches, as they don't usually have big tanks full of expensive gold plating solution.
Colin Bignell
On 29/05/2013 11:37, Martin Brown wrote: ...
H&S and environmental controls mean that not many professional platers use cyanide these days either. A plating shop I used to know in London had enough cyanide to kill half the city and a couple of small bottles of antidote, which, from the layers of dirt, I doubt were in date and which I very much doubt could have been mixed and administered in time to save anybody.
Colin Bignell
On Wednesday 29 May 2013 13:17 Nightjar wrote in uk.d-i-y:
With the constant rubbing of nut on nut (ooh-er missus) wouldn't pretty much any plating just fall off in short order?
On 29/05/2013 15:30, Tim Watts wrote: ...
Provided the plating has been done to British Standards, it should last long enough for the novelty of the bracelet to wear off first.
I would be more concerned about the effect on the elastic of the threads inside the nuts rubbing on it. If I were making it, I would probably fit plastic bushes, which should be quite simple to turn from nylon studding, to reduce wear on the elastic.
Colin Bignell
I thought cyanide antidotes were relatively simple chemicals, and didn't
*have* shelf-lives.
Or drill out the nuts, and stick a countersink into each side to bevel the inner edges?
One such, used after smoke inhalation, is Vitamin B12 as hydroxocobalamin, intravenous, 5 grams. From memory, infused over 15 minutes.
AIUI, the problem was that a hot, humid environment, rich in acid fumes, which was fairly standard for plating shops half a century or so ago, was not an ideal place to store them.
Colin Bignell
Either would be tedious and I suspect that shelling out £195 would not only be a lot simpler, but also better received.
Colin BIgnell
The £195 one has the threads on the nuts still, IIRC.
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