Okay Rob, we're going to talk about gold plating stainless steel using the Universal Plater.
Okay, as Terry said we're set up here with the Universal Plater.
This is set up particularly for doing stainless steel. So we have
Electro Clean here,
we have the Woods Nickel Strike here,
and then our 24k Brush Gold solution, the standard brush gold.
We do have it set up with the
larger conversion bit which goes from this little eighth inch to a bigger, so that
we can have the bigger sleeves the purpose is to carry more solution.
As we're going to be doing a larger item and also it just helps with doing
electro clean and woods sometimes to have a bigger sleeve carry more solution.
So we have that on our Woods Nickel Strike as well
and then our gold we just have the standard quarter inch gold sleeve on a conversion bit.
Over here we have the piece we're going to be doing which is a 316 stainless steel so
polished stainless steel finish and this is one of the hardest stainless steels
to plate the 316. So if you can do this, then you can pretty much do any steel
and this is the way you would want to treat any steel item that you're going to be plating.
Okay, so let's just move right ahead. We're going to cover the
concept of wetting out, that's something I really want to highlight.
We call it wetting out and that is the electro clean step.
See if you squirt water on stainless steel
it's just like it's a wax.. it's like it's a
waxed car. The water just beads up and falls right off of it.
This is a major problem.
If you try and put gold straight on it will not stick, it will not adhere,
it'll take forever to go on, you shouldn't even move forward as long
as your stainless steel is doing this. Now the electro clean step luckily fixes
that. What kind of voltage should we want to have for the electro clean?
well let's try, let's start out at 6 volts.
What do you think of that?
Yeah, six or seven, yeah you're good. I'll start out six.
Okay, you've shown us that the water just runs right off. Yeah we'll highlight that
again. I'm going to go over the wetting out.
Okay, so we'll start down here. We'll do like a.. like a four-inch section k?
Okay. So we're just going to start.
You'll see a voltage drop on the machine maybe by a volt.
That's okay, that means that the currents
flowing that's actually a signal that your.. your sleeve is soaked
and that it's working properly. Why don't you hold still for a sec,shouldn't there be some bubbling at the surface?
yeah it's kind of hard to see with the woolie but yeah..yeah, you
would see some bubbling. Okay. If you had a flat sleeve ah..
the voltage drop shows me that the.. so we dropped down from our six and now we're down about
five point one volts while your electro cleaning, okay.
Yeah and if you weren't getting that drop then your sleeve may not be soaked.
Prior to putting the sleeve on I actually took it over to a sink and ran it under running
water and ringed it out in my fingers. Just for the first time use.
It really helps the sleeve to absorb the solution. Okay, so we we are going to
Electro clean. You kind of.. you're okay to overdo this. You know notice I'm not
timing it. I'm just going over it. I want to make sure that I'm getting everywhere
very well, because anywhere that is got that beading or breaking is not going,
you may as well not even continue if you have that. So let's check it at this
point. It's probably been, i don't know, half a minute- 45 seconds. We're squirting the
water on and notice, no longer is there water breaks.
Over here where we haven't got, see that? It's just a huge difference.
Yeah, the water just falls right off,
whereas over here, it stays wet.
That's why we call it wetting out
and if on this piece, if I were to have an area over here where
it's breaking, after a second, see even up here on the
top edge it is a little bit. But that may just be because it's sat for a second.
I mean this looks pretty good but if there were a question, you know I'm just going
to go over it again for a second right there. Why not?
It doesn't hurt.
Let's go over it a little bit more.
I believe this is probably electro cleaned sufficiently at this point.
So make sure you rinse off between steps, well.
Now you're rinsing with what kind of water? It's distilled water. I recommend that for every step.
You're using like one of those squeeze bottles. Yeah just a squirt bottle. You can get
them for a couple bucks. Okay, now we're going to just get that water off, see it still wet out.
Now I'm going to immediately move on to the Woods Nickel
Strike, still at six volts, and I'm going to do about the bottom four inches here.
I'm just going to quickly go over it for, you know, to get everywhere just real quickly.
Maybe 15 seconds.
While you're doing that, I'm going to.. okay, so we're
getting about the same kind of voltage drop with the Woods Nickel Strike as you did with the Electro Clean.
Now should I expect to be able to see anything at this point?
No, you shouldn't see anything.
If you're seeing burning, hazing, anything
like that you're probably too high on the voltage but you also don't want to
overdo this too much. Just a quick layer, it applies a non-visible. You may be
able to see a difference, probably not.
And then after that step, you know, it
doesn't look as hydrophilic, which is odd, but we're going to move straight onto
the gold plating now. Now what voltage do we want to be out for the gold? We want to
adjust our voltage down to let's do four and a half.
4.5, okay. Let's see if the gold just.. should go right on
and then one to three seconds, the area you're plating should begin turning gold. If it doesn't,
there's some sort of issue. It shouldn't be taking 5-10 seconds to turn gold, okay.
See we've already done that two square inch area right there. I mean it just flies
on and that's what you want to see. It's a very consistent look.
You're not going to have splotchiness, you don't want to see any of that. If you're seeing that, that's
probably insufficient activation or Electro Clean.
You know, people can really
have an issue with that and it's almost always that. Either the Electro Clean or
activation. Now notice on the Electro Clean step, I Electro Cleaned
about six inches. I came about halfway up the strip to about here. Now I did the
Woods a little bit less, about five inches.
Now I'm going to gold plate only
about four inches and that's to make sure the area i'm gold plating has been fully activated.
So this area now is.. looks beautiful. I hope you can see it
good in the video there. It's a very uniform, nice layer of gold. Looks great!
Tip it back and forth a little bit.
Looks great! Roll it.
Yeah!
Okay. Toward me.
That's good, okay. Okay, so now the.. that area is gold-plated
and you know that's what you're looking for. Now to move on and to do.. if I were
gonna do this whole piece, I would just move on here. Electro Clean this section.
Do another 5 inch-6 inch section and then, you know, do not for a good minute.
Then Woods Nickel Strike a 5 inch section. Do that just for 20 30 seconds.
You know, hold your piece so your Woods isn't running down into your gold too
much. Try and always angle your drip edge well.
Then rinse it off and then we
would go plate a four inch section and it would look the same. You won't see
a line here. You may want to taper over into the gold. There's a half inch or so
that you'll have a uniform plate.
Those are the main points we wanted to cover in this video.
If you have any questions, please comment or give us a call.
But that's plating stainless steel with
Universal, with Electro Clean, Woods Nickel Strike, and 24K standard Brush Gold.
Thanks!