Hi guys, okay, today I'm going to be showing you a new edition of the
Universal Plater called the Universal Pro Series Chrome. It's our Universal Plater kit that gives you the option of plating gold on to
chrome-plated items like car emblems. Okay, so we're just going to get right
into it. Here I have a little emblem here it's chrome plated. Whenever they chrome
plate something there is a layer of nickel underneath it. So that's the key
to the whole thing. The first step, we're going to be stripping the chrome off so
that we can get to the underlying layer of nickel because you don't want to gold
plate straight onto chrome. So with the kit we're going to put it to the Chrome
Stripping position and what that does is it automatically sets this first yellow
port over here to the correct voltage and everything. You don't even need to
have to worry about the volt output nothing it's already ready to roll. We
take it and here we go. All right, we're gonna start just spreading it on there.
Now you'll see that it will start to change color and what that is, is that's
the chrome removing and when the chrome comes off. The underlying metal
will have almost a coppery tint to it. It's like maybe even a little bit of a
goldish, copper tint. And that's how you know that the chrome is coming off. Now
you do want to do this in an area with local ventilation, meaning have a window
open, have a door open, have a fan blowing across because the fumes are a little
bit nasty. They're not something you just want to sit there and breathe in
and steal air. Now if you notice I clipped the black clip to the back here,
just to anywhere off and I'm only going to be plating the part that's going to be visible, because this will be mounted
onto a car and you know you don't want to worry about the part that you can't
see. I'm just taking my time and chrome stripping everywhere that's going
to be visible, all the way around the edges here, down in these little nooks
and crannies, and you know keep dipping, make sure you have plenty of chrome
stripping solution. It's fairly cheap so you don't want to, you know, go
short on it.
Now I think I've pretty much got it all off, I could probably move
forward right now. Just going to spend another ten or fifteen seconds on here,
Just to make sure. If you don't get it all off, it can cause problems so you're
better off over doing it than under doing it. In the event that you
didn't get all the chrome off and you went forward and gold plate it, you may
see areas that are cloudy or hazy. You know, you'll have different visual issues
and you'll have to polish it off with some Mother's Mag aluminum polish or
similar and start over. Okay, so I believe the chrome stripped. I'm going to rinse
it off here, kind of look over everywhere make sure there isn't somewhere I didn't
obviously miss.
But to me it looks good.
There's a spot right there I'm going to get just a little bit more because I think I
see some chrome there.
So I'm just going to get here a little more.
Okay, let's try it out, move on and see how it goes.
Okay, so next we're going to
move on to the activation. So we come over to this switch and we switch it to
normal plating. That works for these two ports here, the middle and the gold
port. Here we have our Surface Activator solution and we want to set the voltage
to six or seven volts. We'll be fine now, this is just a quick activation of
the nickel. You can't really hurt it if you overdo it, but it's just not
necessary to go too long. Just 15-20 seconds is sufficient. You're just
activating that underlying layer of nickel and getting it ready for gold plating.
Rinse that off.
Now it's really important that you change the voltage between this
step and the next. You know, you don't want to be gold plating at 6.2 volts. You want to change it down to five.
I would recommend five at the most, maybe a little more once you're a little more experienced. But stay at five because the
voltage is going to drop down as soon as I touch this to it and start plating.
It'll drop down by about whole volt and go to four volts. Now let's see, here we go.
Ready? Go.
So you know immediately the gold starts
to fly on there, that is a good sign. If it's taking five to ten seconds for the
gold to start going on, there's something wrong. Maybe you didn't strip all the
chrome. That's most likely what happened if the gold is not going on quickly or
your voltage is too low, maybe you just need to turn it up a little bit. If
you've got to turn it up much more than five volts to five and a half volts,
you're probably a chrome issue.
But as you can see it's turning gold quickly.
It looks very nice.
Now you want to spend probably, you know one to two minutes in
a given area. Dip frequently, you know, make sure you get everywhere and this is
actually a rapidly applying gold solution that we make. It goes on
pretty quickly in this one to two minute time. You are really applying a fairly,
relatively, thick layer of gold in the electroplating industry.
It'll last a long time, if these are taken good care of. See, it's already done. I mean you could
call it good right there. It's very, very nice plate on it. Now I
want to try and rinse it off and show you how beautiful it looks.
And now I would take it and you know, maybe rinse it on a sink, whatever,
dip it in another thing. Make sure you get all the solution off and out of it.
But I'm just going to take a paper towel and dry it off and i'm going to unclip it.
Bring it over here, and make sure real quickly we don't get any water spots here.
Now that looks great!
And that is how you gold plate a chrome plated item using the
Universal Chrome edition. A regular Universal Plater is not set up to do this, so
if you're going to be doing cars, make sure you get the Chrome Edition. It's our
new kit. People are going to love it! Thanks for watching!