Hey guys I'm Nate welcome back to the workshop metal plating is a fun and relatively easy
Project that you can do at home with some easily available supplies and chemicals
Metal plating is a process by which one metal is chemically bonded to the surface of another this can be used to change the appearance
electrical conductivity or corrosion resistance of a material
The purpose of today's video is to learn an easy do-it-yourself method for both copper and nickel plating
We'll start with the copper plating
Here's what we'll need for that process sim distilled water some copper sulfate a piece of copper pipe and an old cell phone charger
It's possible in this experiment will work. Just fine with tap water, but it's best to eliminate any unknown minerals and chemicals
So that's why we're using distilled water this route kill product
I think is the cheapest way to get copper sulfate and any sort of pure form it's sold in most hardware stores
Always be sure you're wearing gloves when handling this stuff because it can be pretty irritating to the skin
This is just a scrap of copper pipe pretty much any piece of scrap copper will work
just fine the old cell phone charger is an AC to DC adapter it takes in anywhere between 100 and
240 volts and has an output of five point nine volts
At point three seven five amps as our first step
Let's measure off two cups of our distilled water into a glass jar and then let's heat that up in the microwave
There we go now, we've got our water heated up nice, and hot it's not boiling, but it is quite warm
So let's measure off one and a half ounces of our copper sulphate crystals and mix our crystals into the water
We can use glass plastic or I'm using bamboo, but we don't want to use anything metal to stir this up
There we have it our copper sulphate crystals are almost entirely dissolved into our water moving on to the next step
Let's prep our power adapter. We don't need the part that plugs into a cell phone, so let's clip that off and split the wires
Now with our wires split. Let's strip the ends about an inch and a half
With the wires stripped let's attach alligator clips one to each end
Making sure that the ends of our alligator clips are not touching each other we can plug in our cord
One of these is the negative lead and one is the positive to test which is which let's dip the tips of the clips
into our copper sulfate solution
We can see that the alligator clip with the black lead has become coated with copper on the tip
So that's the side that will attach our metal that we want plated with the two leads identified
Let's unplug our cord while we prep our metals to be copper plated to start out
Let's try using a regular
Quarter and see if we can get that to take a nice copper coating before we start dipping it into the liquid with electricity running
Through it we need to clean and prep the surface so it's completely free of any dirt or oils
Let's clean this quarter in two stages first
I've got some very fine steel wool
And I'm just gonna scour over the entire surface of the quarter every little bit of it to try and clean it off
Then to make sure I've got all degrees removed
I've got some grease removing soap, and I'll try and wash down the quarter really well
I'm also wearing gloves so any grease that's on my hands will not get transferred on to the quarter you
See that our quick buffing has made our quarter a fair bit shinier same thing on the back
There we go with the surface of our quarter nice and buff
Let's take our soap and really try and clean all the greases and oils off of it
Our quarter is prepped and ready
So now let's attach a piece of copper to our positive lead and then the coin to our negative lead
Now once we plug in the cord
we should be able to dip the coin down into the liquid and a copper plating should start to appear pretty quickly just
As a first test I'm gonna dip the quarter down in and then pull it out after only about two seconds
Let's see if it does anything
One two
You can see it's already started to get a little bit of a tint around the edges
So that's going pretty fast put it back in but leave it for a little bit longer
One two three nine ten
Boom look at that that is a quarter coated in copper
Now one thing is often right where the lead is biting into it
There will be a little spot where the plating isn't very even so I'm gonna move the lead to the other side of the quarter
And we'll dip it back in this time. I think we'll try leaving in for twenty or thirty seconds
I'm going to turn it around as well, so the other side of the coin is facing the copper pipe some of the time
When we go look at that that is a coin with quite a bit of copper
Plating it. We have a nice shiny copper colored quarter
Let's rinse off the quarter and see if we can buff that so it's a little bit shinier
We've got our steel wool. Let's lightly buff our copper and see if it brings out any shine
Buffed with steel wool that looks pretty good
Let's also try using a little bit of brass polish to see if it will bring out the shine just a little bit more
See it's definitely doing something
Now maybe if I used a Polish that was specifically designed for copper we would get an even better look but brass is
Mostly made of copper. I think the brass polish is working pretty. Well. Yeah. He's looking good that is one
Shiny copper quarter see a color comparison between a regular colored quarter and a copper colored quarter
All right, I really liked how the quarter turned out so now
I want to try doing the same thing with a nickel and a dime
So I can just have a whole copper colored set
There we have it
I think our copper plating is working out wonderfully so now let's move on to how to do your own
Nickel plating nickel is a bright silvery colored metal that is very corrosion resistant
So if you have something that's plated in nickel it will often stay looking nice and new even if it's been around for quite some
Time for our nickel plating we need even fewer supplies than we did for our copper plating. We've got some distilled white vinegar
And some guitar strings now you can see down at the bottom that says that these guitar strings
Have a pure nickel wrap
The only local sources of pure nickel that I could find
Was the wrap around these guitar strings and sometimes you can find pure nickel welding rods
If you're doing this make sure you get some that say they have a pure
Nickel wrap other strings may say that they are nickel, but unless they say pure nickel on them
It's probably a nickel plated steel that won't work very well so to start
Let's just pour off some white vinegar into our glass jar with
Our vinegar poured into a jar we now want to add a small dash of our salt
This will help the vinegar be a little bit more conductive
This is sea salt, but you can really be using any type
Now we need to remove the pure nickel wire from the steel core of the guitar strings
You can see that the pack comes with several different thicknesses of guitar strings. Let's start with the thickest one
If you look very closely as I begin to unwind this wire you can see that
There is one wire wrapped very tightly around a second wire
With these guitar strings the outer wire is our pure nickel and the inner wire is a nickel plated steel
We now want to unwind all of our nickel wire from off of the inner core pretty simple process. Let's just grab the nickel end
Secure the rest of the wire and start pulling should unwind
Once we get about six to eight inches down
Let's just clip off the core wire do the same thing again until we've pulled the whole thing off the guitar string
Yeah, that's pretty good right there
We can toss out the end of our guitar string we won't need it
Now we want to divide our nickel wire into approximately two even pieces
All right now I've got a good length of nickel wire. Let's just wrap this around our fingers a few times a
Lot of times actually just keep wrapping until there's only about a foot of the wire left unwrapped
Go we now have this nice bundle of nickel wire. It's got a tale about a foot long
so let's squish down our bundle and
Then let's use that tail to wrap it all closed
We go one nice little nickel stick
Let's just do the same thing with the other bit of wire
Now that we have our two bundles of nickel wire we want to attach one of them to each of our alligator clips that we
were using before
At this point we want to lower the alligator clips down into our vinegar until
Almost all of the nickel is submerged in the vinegar
I'll also use a little bit of electrical tape to hold them in place so they don't accidentally bump into each other
Now shortly after plugging in our charger we see bubbles starting to form on the negative end
You'll want to watch this solution and check up on it every few hours
The nickel wire will actually begin to dissolve from the end that isn't bubbling
After 8 to 10 hours you may need to replace it with a new string by that time you may also be able to see
a slight change in color as your vinegar changes from clear to a slightly turquoise green
Now we need to plug in our charger and let this sit for 24 to 48 hours
now here
I've got a solution that I let sit for about 24 hours and in the process of doing so it
dissolved its way through two of those nickel guitar string wraps
So now that we have our solution of what's called nickel acetate
We can begin to use this to plate nickel on to copper
Nickel doesn't do a very good job of sticking to most metals, but it will stick to almost anything with a copper base
So it's copper brass or bronze we successfully coated three silver colored coins in copper now
Let's see if we can take a copper colored coin and turn it silver the process is basically the same except that instead of using
A copper pipe we just use another one of our nickel wraps attached to the positive end attach it to our cleaned and polished penny
see it starting to react very quickly I
Haven't dipped the penny all the way in so we should get a nice dividing line right across it to see the difference
Beautiful
There's a shiny half silver penny right there
Let's turn it around and coat the other side, so we just have a completely silver colored pin
You can see it's currently bubbling more on the spot that wasn't already plated in the nickel
It's also bubbling quite a bit around the alligator clips, which I think I'm turning back to silver colored
the nickel goes on very smoothly
So if you had a shiny object going in you usually have a shiny one coming out
You probably should not try metal plating any utensils that are going to be using for eating
Just because if the metal isn't bonding properly it could come off and you know if you have a nickel or copper allergy
It's just not a great idea
But I am going to try it on the spoon not to eat with just because I think it will look cool on the nice
Curved surface, you can't really see through the liquid. No orange color comes up out of the blue very well
We got a little bit around the edges of our spoon that's interesting
This is stainless steel, and it really doesn't pick up much color very well
Almost like it resists staining
Not nearly as fast as the coins those. Just those go almost immediately. It's getting somewhere though
We've got copper building up around the edges
I even hit this spoon with some light and grit sandpaper to help the copper stick better
But I think it's just gonna wipe right off with a paper towel
There we go I think our stainless steel spoon is about as coated in copper as it's going to get
See it doesn't stay at all
Not very much little bits down at the tip stayed
Most of that is just coming right off just for kicks and giggles
Let's see if we can nickel plate the copper on the end of our stainless steel spoon
Something is definitely happening lots of bubbling going on down there
Well I think that pretty well worked we had our copper all built up on the back of the spoon now
And it's turned back to being great colors
Just sort of a weird model gray now. It doesn't look like a new spoon. It looks like this spoon has
Maybe been kicking around for quite a few years and just getting eaten up on the edge
Oh, and it's not sticking it earlier. So you can see it's peeling right off. That's the copper
Is delaminating from the stainless steel, but even though I thought I did a very good job of cleaning this stainless steel spoon
It does not want to stick to it at all
There you have it easy do-it-yourself
Copper and nickel plating like I said before nickel doesn't stick to everything but copper does stick to quite a bit
So if you have something you want nickel plated you can copper plate it first and then clean it and transfer it into the nickel
bath
Something else that's good to know is these liquids shouldn't really go bad very quickly if you've got a lid you should be able to
Put that on your jar store
It away and then pull it out and use it again when you're ready for your next
Plating project if you've got any great ideas of things you think will look good plated in either copper or nickel let us know down
In the comments and we might just try it out
Thanks for joining us for this video today and remember to come gear yourself up with hats shirts and other cool merch at the king
Of random comm see you there
So now we have just
So much stainless steel does not like to stain