Hi guys this is Rob with Gold Plating Services and today I'm going to be making this video
to show you how to nickel plate onto steel.
Whether it's mild steel, cold steel it doesn't matter.
This is the procedure that you follow for plating steel.
A lot of people want to nickel plate on the steel to give it a diffusion barrier.
If you just put the gold directly onto the steel; such as let's say you wanted to build
a plated gun.
If you just put the gold directly onto the steel, the steel can actually still rust underneath
the gold.
Then it will destroy the gold plating.
The way that is prevented is by putting on a bright nickel plate.
Here's our piece that we're gonna be doing today.
This is just a standard piece of steel.
This here is the Universal Plater.
The standard kit which I already have set up.
I have an electric cleaner over here.
I have a woods nickel strike here with the nickel conversion bit.
Now those are not included with the standard Universal Plater kit, so you would need to
get those extra for doing steel.
This is the bright nickel which also has a nickel conversion bit.
Now we're just gonna get to it.
For the first step we would want to set the voltage to eight volts prior to touching this
to it.
Once we touch this to it you'll see it would drop down to seven volts.
It usually drops about one volt, so we're gonna sit here and electric clean for probably
about thirty seconds.
You're better off overdoing the electric cleaner as opposed to not doing it enough.
If you don't do it enough it will cause problems in the end.
You absolutely cannot do steel without electric cleaning first.
We'll maybe dip one more time to make sure we get nice and hot electric cleaner.
You can see it bubbling, that's a good sign.
The key of this step is after you rinse the electric cleaner off you're looking for a
hydrophilic surface.
Meaning, when you rinse it off, it stays wet everywhere that you just electric cleaned.
See down here where I haven't electric cleaned the water just runs away from it.
That's an uncleaned area whereas look at what the electric clean area does; it stays wet.
That's whats called wetting out or a hydrophilic steel surface.
Okay now we are gonna do the woods nickel strike.
With this step you don't do it nearly as long.
Maybe in this area here ten seconds.
Just to get everywhere, but not you know spend as much time as you would if you were doing
electric cleaning.
Now because this is steel already we may not see a huge difference in the color change.
I'm going to se the voltage down to four volts prior to touching it and let's see how it
goes.
You may not see any sort of color difference whatsoever; that's okay because it's steel.
Yeah see there's no visible change.
You just have to know because the voltage dropped you may see a color change on you
application just depending on the type of steel, the color and whatnot.
In this scenario you can't see a difference.
Now what I'm going to do is go ahead and gold plate it.
Over here I have a separate beaker that has gold in it.
You actually could put it in this little one right here, but I have it in a separate side
beaker.
Just undo the thumb screw here and stick it onto this bit, which is a really nice thing
about those combination handles.
We are already at the right voltage four volts works well for gold plating.
We'll turn it up a little bit if we need to.
Then we'll just go straight to the gold plating.
See it's going on; I wish it were going on a little faster.
So I'm actually gonna turn it up to four point seven five.
We are just gonna gold plate it.
You can actually crank it up while plating, sometimes you can be at five and a half sometimes
even six volts if you're good.
Keep constantly moving like I am.
If you stay still in one spot you can get burning.
If you get burning you can always clean it up with a little bit of baking soda and water.
Just polish it with baking soda and water and most burning will clean right up.
If you notice it is burning, stop.
There's no point in continuing, stop and turn your voltage down.
Pull that out, let's check it out.
Nice nickel and gold plated piece steel.
Now that piece will never corrode.
I mean, granted, that was not a great looking piece of steel to begin with, but if it were
polished to a nice shine like you would if you were gonna do a gun that would look really
nice.
You're not going to get corrosion from that.
Now one other thing that I want to do is, now actually, using the same piece I'm going
to nickel plate over that gold.
Earlier that you couldn't see that nickel plating happening, so I'm just going to quickly
electric clean this.
You could probably get away with immediately putting nickel on, but let's do this just
to play it safe.
Just kidding we don't even really need this step.
We're just gonna quickly hit it.
That did apply a tiny bit of nickel; it's not meant to be a decorative plate.
When you use the woods nickel strike it's a strike, but it does apply a little bit of
nickel.
Turn the voltage back down for a nickel plate.
It looks like it's just going back to the stainless steel, but there's the nickel.
That's what was happening when it was the steel before.
It was actually putting nickel on; I just wanted to demonstrate that.
That's how you nickel plate and gold plate onto steel, stainless steel or any kind of
steel.
It's the same process electric clean it until it completely wets out do that at seven volts.
Strike at seven volts as well, usually spend about ten to fifteen seconds in an area that
big.
Rinse that off really well and do the nickel plating at four volts.
You should get a nice layer of nickel on there.
Then you can go ahead and gold plate it or leave it nickel if that's what you desire.
Thanks for watching.