Nickle plating

[94touring]

Hey it's easy!  I wanted a way to plate some things I'm making with the lathe and did a little research.  Come to find out nickle plating is very simple.  Distilled vinager, kosher salt, 2 stick plates of nickle, and a battery charger set to low volts and amps, or I got a usb cable with aligator clips to run off a phone charger.  I let the nickle plates run over night with the phone charger and got the solution to a nice green, letting me know the nickle had infused in the vinegar.  Hooked up a test piece of metal to the negative, a piece of nickle on the positive and let it run about an hour.  Presto, nickle plated.  Poured the solution back into the gallon jug and can reuse it as often as I need.  The one stick of nickle shown is what happens when you're creating the solution.  Pulls the nickle off the stick, leaving it eaten up.  The other stick gains some nickle as it draws it across through the solution. Side by side view of the metal pins showing one plated and one that's not plated, the plated one has a slight yellow to it.

[BruceK]

That's cool.  It's like a fun science project for adults. 

Where do you get the quality nickel metal to do this?

[94touring]

That's cool.  It's like a fun science project for adults. 

Where do you get the quality nickel metal to do this?

Indeed!  I got them off ebay. Very affordable.  There's other types of plating you can do which the sticks are readily available also, like zinc. I just wanted something to keep custom bolts from rusting that I'm making with the lathe. I'm sure there will be other things that pop up that I'll want to plate too.

[jeff10049]

I have some plating stuff from a company called Caswell that's supposed to replicate the yellow cad and other finishes.
 I have not tried it out yet But it gets nickel-plated first then passivated I think for the cadmium look.
Id like to be able to plate newly made items like you're doing and also restore old hardware to look like new either zinc or CAD.
 Most of the bolts in my mini are correctly head-marked pieces Like BEES, Wiley, and Linreed.
I'd like to re-plate some of them.

[MiniDave]

When I restored my Jag, I took a bucket full of parts, fasteners, nuts and bolts - all rusty and greasy and nasty to the local guy, he cleaned and plated all with silver cad plate and most all of them came out looking brand new - some of the badly rusted stuff came back pitted and nasty, I just replaced them with new stuff. 30 years later none of it had rusted tho it was all really dull looking.

The only place I can find local here in KC will do a 5 gallon bucket of stuff for about $200.....doesn't matter what's in the bucket......2 month wait time to get it done.

I like the idea of being able to plate stuff at home, but it took a lot of the sacrificial material to do that one bolt, didn't it?

[94touring]

No, it barely uses anything to plate after you have your solution. I doubt there's enough things I'll ever plate to require making another solution batch. 

[jeff10049]

Something else I've recently played with that might be nice for lathe-made parts is blueing. I bought a bottle of Perma blue gun blueing. I used it to reblue some spring steel clips on a magneto I'm working on it looks good easy to do.

[MiniDave]

I wonder how well the nickel plating will last out in the weather?

[94touring]

Probably a very long time.  That's the purpose of the plating after all.