Hi this is Lewis from Gold Plating Services.
I’m here again with Rob to show you some new tips and ideas.
Today we are looking at stainless steel and chrome.
When polished the kind of, well no not kind of, they look exactly the same.
We’re going to show you how to differentiate between them and then we’re also going to
gold plate some chrome for you.
We pulled out one of our little beaker trays that we sell and put a few extra solutions
in there.
Rob is going to show you how to tell the difference and then he’ll plate a little bit on to
the stainless steel for you.
All right thanks Lewis.
Alright this is a really common question when it comes to automotive plating.
Commonly called Eyebrow Trim which is over the wheels will be stainless steel.
Window trim as well is frequently stainless steel, and the ones around the headlights.
If you try and strip stainless steel, it doesn’t work obviously.
I’m going to show you a few tips and like what happens if you try and what’s the best
way to proceed.
This is not polished; this is a matte piece of stainless steel, but it doesn’t make
a difference we’ll get the point.
What you do if you’re not sure, put the it in a stripping mode and just go ahead and
try and strip it.
Just see what happens.
What you’re looking for is, if it’s chrome, if you've ever done chrome it turns a yellow.
Your sleeve turns yellow and your solution turns yellow.
The piece starts to turn a bronze tan color.
As you can see here nothing is happening except bubbling and so that right there immediately
would tell me okay this item is not chrome because if it were it would be turning yellow
and stripping.
I'm going to show you now what happens if it is chrome.
Just in case you were wondering.
This is just a regular wrench and there’s something perfect to practice on by the way.
If and I always tell people to practice as much as possible before do it on a customer's
car or your own.
As you can see here it's quickly turning a bright yellow color.
You may or may not be able to see, but the piece actually turns a bronze color and what
that is is that's the underlying nickel.
Now some types of nickel aren’t as bronzy as this one is.
This one is particularly obvious.
That's a good indicator.
You see the solution turn yellow, a bronze color you proceed with the stripping chrome
steps.
Now we have a lot of videos showing that and we're going to put a link them below.
to keep this video short.
We're going to move on to the stainless steel.
Now you’ve determined that the item is indeed stainless steel.
The question then becomes what do you do.
What you do is put your machine into normal plating and as soon as you do that this first
solution that was chrome stripper now effectively becomes electro cleaner.
Which is the first step when you’re plating on the stainless steel.
You keep it at 7 volts for these first two steps.
What we need to do before we move on, because we’re not going to be using the activator,
we are going to switch out our thumb screw here we’re going to undo it leave the bit
in that activator and we’re going to hook up the Wood’s Nickel strike now.
This is Wood’s Nickel strike and it’s only used for stainless steel and steel.
It’s basically an activator for those two solutions.
Before we do that, we want to electric clean.
You electric clean the same exact way you stripped the chrome.
You know the same amount of time; you need to make sure it’s well electric cleaned
because if you don’t, you’re going to be sorry when the gold doesn’t stay on.
This is by far the most important step, all of them are important, but you got to make
sure it’s well electric cleaned or nothing else works.
Then you move on to the Wood’s Nickel strike.
You do the Wood’s Nickels strike about the same as you do the electro clean.
A couple seconds per square inch get everywhere and rinse.
I’m going to turn the voltage down and little bit so that we don’t get burning.
Some people can keep the voltage really high and not get burning it’s more of a skill
thing.
As you see there goes the gold flying on there.
See if I hadn’t electro cleaned it well or struck it properly the gold just doesn’t
go on fast at all.
You get it to deposit, but it doesn’t fly on like that.
This is already gold plated, if I rinse it off it looks good.
If you’re doing a door handle or something you definitely would want to put on the gold
for maybe a couple minutes.
I’d spend maybe two minutes in that area and that would be so thick it wouldn’t wear
off for a long time, but as you can see it’s got a nice gold plate on it.
If you guys have any specific questions about this or something didn’t make sense just,
please comment below.
You can always email or give us a call.
And again, this is the Universal Plater- Chrome Edition.
This right here you maybe you’ve never seen this in a video before, this is our auxiliary
beaker tray.
It’s for this exact situation where you’ve maybe got other chemicals that you want to
work with you don’t want to have to take them in and out all that stuff.
It’s pretty convenient.
All this stuff can be found on our website if you have any questions give us a call or
comment below.
Thanks for watching!