Hey guys, this is Amy with ask Amy. Today we are with Terry. He's one of our
plating specialist and he is going to show us how to gold plate onto a pre-
nickel plated item using our Universal Plater, Terry:
The Universal Plater is one of our very popular machines in that it is universal
because it will gold plate with gold, it will gold plate with nickel, it
will plate with copper and to demonstrate the basic operation of it
I'm going to gold plate one side of this nickel plated fishing lure and I took it
right out of the pack the only thing i've done to it is removed the hook.
Now to set the machine up for gold plating a nickel item
what I've done is I've put my Electro Clean solution that comes with the kit
into the first beaker.
I put my Surface Activator Solution into the second beaker and I put my
gold-plating solution into the third beaker.
For the pretreatment process what
I'm going to do is I'm going to adjust my voltage to just over six volts.
Right now it's like 6.2 volts.
Now if you have it a nickel plated item is very easy to gold plate with the
Universal Plater using these three basic steps. In fact these three basic steps
really apply the process applies to a lot of different plating scenarios.
So because this is an electroplating we do need to provide an electrical charge to
the piece that we are plating and to do that we use what we call the common lead.
I just find some obscure place the hook it and I'm going to hook it in the
hole here and that securely holds the part and provides the electrical charge.
If... the very first step we need to do is we've got to prepare the surface
to receive the pretreatment and the plating process.
What I'm going to do
is I'm going to spray a little bit of water on here and you'll see that the
water
beading off their just like almost like a car after you've waxed it.
The water beads up. The surface is not wetting out
you can see the the beading going on and the water just runs right off.
What we want to do, is we want to treat the surface so that the plating solutions
can come in to more intimate contact or wet out better.
To do that, the first step of the process is our Electro-Cleaner.
Electro-Cleaner is a.. you can think of it like a super cleaning solution.
Now even if i had washed this part with soap and water,
It still would not wet out. It would do... it even bead off... the water would bead
off about like it is here.
Amy: What happens if you plate it when the water is beading up like that?
What can happen is you can have it may go well in some areas and it may not go
well in others but it certainly would reduce the likelihood of having good
overall adhesion and a good consistent layer.
It's just like if you're
going to paint your walls at home if you didn't clean them properly
you know the paint might peel off here there. Having the surface perfectly
clean is always a good idea for any kind of coating, whether it's painting or
Electro-Cleaning.
Now when I Electro Clean
I'm just going to go over the surface
and you'll notice a very light gassing. I hope you can see that.
It's like a little bit of foaming going on
That's bubbling.
It is created by the electrical current and the Electro- Clean solution
I'm going to spend probably maybe 30 seconds on a piece this size.
The good thing is after I'm done Electro-Cleaning I'll be able to tell if I've done a good job,
because i'll take my rinse water and remember how the water beaded it up?
Now the water, when they spray the water on there, see how it just
sheets off perfectly well
If i could see a little area like let's say a
little area up in this corner well... if the water
beaded off or if that even dried a little bit more quickly then all i would
simply do is just take the Electro-Cleaner and hit that spot again.
For some reason there was some type of material on the surface of that metal that was preventing the water
from wetting out
and accessing the surface
Okay, so for the next step we're still going to leave the voltage the same.
and we're going to use our Surface Activator Solution
The way to think of the activator is some people think of it as like a primer
some people call it an etch I guess that could be so it doesn't really etch
the surface but it does remove any oxide- any material that will prevent adhesion.
If you were to try to plate onto a surface without properly activating it,
not only does the
the plating, rather it is gold or copper nickel, go more slowly is likely that may
you may have an adhesion problem.
You know, what we want to do is we want to make sure that whatever we're plating
on to the surface sticks very well.
After the activation, i'm going to rinse again
and again i'm rinsing with distilled water.
If we use regular tap water you
know different parts of the country have really hard water with a lot of calcium
or minerals in it that can leave something on there that could affect the
plating layer. So distilled water is cheap you by the grocery stores about a buck a
gallon and it's well worth the investment to make sure you've got
a very clean pristine surface to plate onto.
Now what i'm going to do is I'm going to turn... Amy: real quick sorry,
What.. do we have to have a spray bottle to get to rinse it or can I just
have a bowl of water with distilled water to kind of dip it in
what's the best tecnique? Terry: yeah that's a great question
if I were doing a lot of these fishing lures, I would probably have a beaker or a
bowl that I could just dip them into and rinse them afterwards. That's very
effective in fact with our immersion unit the Jewel Master
we would have rinse beakers where you would dip the part or even a whole rack
of parts in there to rinse.
So that is a really effective. For doing one item as a
demonstration, a little spray bottle works great. A lot of people might
not even have access to one.
Now for gold plating what I'm going to do is I'm
going to turn the voltage down to oh i'm going to go to about 4.3 volts.
Another thing that's important, now that I've activated the surface the surface is
chemically active and the oxygen in the air would react with it so it's
important for me to to continue with the plating operation before it can dry out
too much.
If I let it dry out... I wouldn't want to get lunch and then come back and
try to plate it, if I did I would want to reactivate it again.
and if I were doing a very large piece i would probably only want to activate one
area and then plate it and activate another area and plate it.
So you don't want to have too much time elapsed between activation and plating.
Okay, now we've got our gold sleeve here, our voltages turned down to about 4.3 volts
and so... i'm going to re-clip that so it will hold a little more firmly
we'll pick our handle up.
I want you to notice how quickly the gold goes on the surface.
When the gold becomes opaque, like it has right there,
you've put on three to four millionths of an inch or what we often call it micro inches
Amy: What does opaque mean?
Opaque means that you can no longer see the silver through... the surface is gold.
A normal decorative gold plate is going to be anywhere from seven to 10
micro inches or millionth.
and so however long it took me for this piece to become opaque,
I'll want to spend two to three times as long to put a good
normal decorative gold plate on this lure.
I suppose for some types of fishing you'd want the lure to be gold on one
side and silver on the other, I don't know. You could go through and do the
same exactly the same process and plate the back of the lure.
Now another question is people say well how do you play under the clip well what I'm going
to do is I'm just going to move the clip momentarily and plate where the clip was
Amy: is that going to scratch my gold or anything?
Probably not, the the clip is a copper clip
It's also nickel-plated, you might want to be careful if you are doing the
emblem on the car, you want to be careful about where you make contact
I usually try to do it in the corner some area where it's kind of out of
the way because.. yeah you don't want to stretch a perfect pristine finish
I like this fishing lure because the the hammer surface kind of shows the
texture it shows the color of the gold very well.
Amy: sometimes my gold doesn't look
quite is shiny as that. It comes on kind of dark dull color.
Terry: yeah one thing that can happen is if you're voltage is too high let's say
i had forgot to turn the voltage down to 4.3 volts from six volts and I
tried the plate
the gold would be dark and dull.. you know maybe I'll just on this very tip
maybe I'll try that just for the fun of it. I'll turn my voltage back up to a
little over six volts.
This is the effect and I'll do it only on the very end here...
and the gold
turns dark and dull see is that what you're talking about Amy? Yeah, that's exactly what i'm talking about
that's a classic overvoltage condition and the nice thing is, that's
very easy to repair you can take a little bit of baking soda and
mix it up into a paste and put it on a paper towel and that will polish out and
it'll be just as beautiful as the rest of the part.
And so it is easy to fix
but it's better to avoid it and so we want to make sure that when we're
plating we've got the voltage set at the correct plating voltage and for an item
like this that's going to be anywhere from four to four and a half volts but
like I say I'm going to do about 4.3 volts
There we go we've a gold plated the fishing lure and like I said a lot of
the principles and concepts involved in plating a simple item like this is
something that would be very important in utilizing any process for your
Universal Plater.
I want to remind everybody that we have a lot of
technical videos and we're putting more on.