electroplating

Electroplating

In my quest to produce a better trumpet, I developed several electroplating recipes which have been met with some success. Copper is what I started with, because it is reportedly easier to plate than other metals, (plus copper was easy and cheap to come by), so I tried a solution of vinegar and salt (I got this recipe from my chem book) and a nine volt battery. No success, all I got was brown goo on my spoon which wiped off, so I tried adding tarn x tarnish remover to the system and although I didn't know why at the time it worked. But the solution was to caustic and didn't stick well, you would plate one spot and another would be eaten away. So I diluted it and things got better until it was to dilute and they got worse. This was not working so I knew I had to do some research. (in retrospect, if I would have added some sodium carbonate, it may have made things much better, but what I have now is better anyway, so why bother?)

I got some magnesium sulfate and sulfuric acid and began to dapple with sodium carbonate to fix the Ph. I finally saw results I liked, they were inconsistent at best, but they were results (my trumpet is covered with copper all over, which looks bad, but it looked good at one time). Then I added ammonia to form complexes with the ions, and results improved further, shinier, harder, and easier to polish.

So being confident in my copper ability I tried other metals with the same recipe, zinc worked, but it was the only one that did. I tried to do brass plating and it worked once, but the copper quickly over powered the zinc in the solution leaving only copper behind. So since I had no need for brass plating anyway, I moved onto nickel, Which is necessary for repairing bad valves on horns. I have yet to find a pure source of nickel, and therefore had only poor results when I used Canadian quarters (is it illegal to destroy currency? I hope not!). anyway different nickel solutions did work to one degree or another.

The ever elusive silver, reportedly impossible to plate with without cyanide (highly toxic and very hard to find). How wrong they were. I started with all sorts of salt combinations and nothing worked until one day I tried potassium iodide, which formed AgKI complex which is water soluble (photo sensitive, but water soluble). Finally I found the perfect mix: KI, Ag, Lugols iodine solution (iodine dissolved in water with KI), HCl, NH3, KNO3, NaHCO3, NaCl, KOH, distilled H2O at 1.5-6 volts for regular plating and 12 for flash plating. This formula (if the correct amounts of ingredients are used, which I cannot tell you because as far as I know this is the first time anybody has ever done this) will produce a layer of silver just as shiny and durable as the commercially available spot plating formulas.

The leadpipe pictured here has been plated with my solution, has been silver for over a year, and has been polished several times, including with an abrasive rouge, the mouthpiece needs polishing (as does the pipe) but the bottom half was plated in the factory (in about 1905, it is an old part) but the middle section was brass, which I plated with copper, then silver. This formula also works very well with zinc, but not copper.

In spring 2006 I entered the Penn State Hazleton campus research fair with my electroplating as my topic, focusing in on the fact that my recipies do not contain cyanide. I won first place! I got one college credit, and a trophy (besides bragging rights). I was going to put my poster presentation here , but I cannot find the files, sorry.

Home, Hobbies

Scott Bogard. 2007

Hey guys, my website has moved, I will no longer update this one. you want to go here for my new site.

Electroplating