Gold plating info

[offshore]

These are some cut & pastes from the old RWG with regard to plating, and the process. Some irrelevant posts are deleted.

Hello,

As promised earlier, here is the receipe to build a pen plating kit from off the shelf radio shack parts. You'll get the same results as the pro ones but will pay a lot less.

Background:

I ordered a plug N plate kit from Casswell canada and started experimenting with the kit. However, I noticed that my end results were dark. After a call to Casswell, I learmed that this was oxidation caused by too much voltage. They made a mistake and shipped a 4.5 volts in the gold plating kit instead of the 1.5 V as it should be. They offered to ship a new one if I send back the old one. Thinking about it, I decided to make my own which would be more versatile than the one offered by Casswell, A kind of embrace and expand project

Here is the kit I received it from Casswell:

I only keep the plating wand from the kit, you can order it stand alone for 5,50$ USD (ref: look at the end of this page):

Then I bought from radio shack:

1- a power supply AC/DC with variable voltage cost: 29.95$ CAD

2- a pack of aligator grip connectors and a pack of gold plated banana connectors. Cost repectively 4,29$ CAD and 5$ CAD and I have a lot of spares to build other kits or to incorporate into other projects.

total cost: I let you do the addition, just to see if you follow

I cut the end connector, the piece you see in the next picture on top of the box. So that the wires (both the positive and the negative) are now ready to accept the connectors.

Then, I welded the aligator grip on the negative wire and the banana connector on the positive wire as illustrated below. The banana grip fits perfectly well with a Casswell stainsless steel wand used to do gold plating. I will check if it also fits well with pen from Ofrei when I'll get them.

That's it! the kit is ready to plate small pieces like watches with a 1.5V and also do bath plating with higher voltages since the power supply has now a variable voltage instead of a fixed one like the Casswell kit.

Now for the gold solutions:

I found that for yellow gold plating the Casswell Fast plate is the best. Fast to plate, no cynanide and therefore not harmful to your health. Moreover, the gold is made of flat palettes having a gorgeous reflective index. I highly recommend that solution.

For other kinds of gold I ordered a 1oz solution from Ofrei, I will try a white gold solution and a pink gold solution. White gold could be used to correct the bugged Royal Oak screws (yellow gold instead of white) and the pink gold employed to correct the buggy clasp on presidential bands. These are my next projects... stay tune....

Feel free to PM me if you need help to build your own plating kit and need advices on plating.

Cheers

Terrific stuff camaieu- Inspires me to get started- Keep up this wonderful info!

offshore

@camaieu:

Thank you for sharing your wonderful concept of an economical solution to gold plating. This is the kind of information I cherish and many other board members with me. It is simple, efficient and cost effective and you wrote it in very understandable terms.

BTW. Is it possible to do some yellow gold plating on already pink gold plated watches? And if so, would the result be acceptable?

Thanks camaieu and I hope to read more of these kind of postings.

Cheers.

Neo

That's great ...I was researching the same thing ...Trying to make a rectifier, but i was stumped on varying the voltage output ....Thats great ! Thank you for the post ! Brilliant

I have never plated before ...So, i hope this is not to stupid ..... can you tank plate with that set up ? ..... If so do you pour plating in a beaker ...... connect the positive to a conducter and insert in the beaker ...and connect the negative to the item you are plating and drop into the beaker full of plating ...... or will this short everything..thank you....also seems like you could use a battery...

Thank you camaieu!

I was just reading up on the suject for some of my old watch bands. How did it turn out? If you spot plate vs. complete plating, can you see the edges? Did you then get the polish kit they offer?

Thanks!

Michael

camaiue,

Whilst staggering around on the Caswell site tonite I found this-

"Make Your Own Brush Plating Wands

Brush plating wands are used to apply electroplating by "brushing" a metal part with a wand, saturated in plating solution. The wand is attached to a power source. The electrical circuit created forces the metal from the solution and deposits it on the part.

Some other plating companies charge up to $50.00 for these so called "high-tech" devices. We are going to show you how to make them yourself in 60 seconds and for pennies.

We sell these wands pre-made for $5.00.

Materials Required for each wand

12" - 24" of copper electrical wire.

3" length of 1/4" diameter stainless steel, copper or brass pipe. (Copper pipe is required for copper plating, brass for brass plating, stainless for all others)

Electrical Tape

Small piece of cloth, such as an old t-shirt. 1" x 6" will suffice.

Elastic band

Making up the wand

With some wire strippers, strip about 1" from the end of the electrical wire.

Insert the wire, stripped end first into the pipe, until the end of the exposed wire reaches the end of the pipe.

With a hammer, flatten the last 1" of the pipe, so that it forms a flat surface and traps the exposed wire inside.

Wrap some electrical tape around the other end of the pipe and wire, so that the end of the pipe is sealed.

LOOSELY wrap the cloth around the flattened end of the pipe and secure it with the elastic band.

That's it. You have a low cost, easy to use brush plating wand.

Using The Wand

Attach the end of the wire to the positive side of your power supply.

Attach an alligator clip to one end of another piece of wire, and attach the non-clip end to the negative side of your power supply.

Clip the alligator clip to the part you want to plate.

Dip the cloth end of your wand into the brush plating solution. Ensure that the wand is saturated all the way through the cloth. Making sure the cloth is LOOSELY wrapped will usually suffice.

Stroke the wet cloth onto the part you want to plate.

When the wet cloth touches the part, an electrical circuit is formed. The current forces the metal out of the solution in the cloth and onto your part forming an electroplated layer. "

Not that you would want to try and build these when they are only $5- but there is the complete solution!!

I have a problem as we have 240v here in Oz, so I am ( hopefully) getting the wand/ solution for Chrissy- and I will use your excellent build instructions for the rest.

Thanks a million- I really appreciate this sort of input- we can't all surf everywhere- so this combined disclosure of info is - I beleive- what truly makes this forum great.

Offshore

PS Have you experience yet with the Ofrei gear?? camaiue,

Once again, thanks for the great info. You are making these

topics very tempting because of the way you present the stuff.

Most of us would never venture into the realm of plating, except

for the chemistry buffs, maybe that's where you got your talent?

Keep it up, as offshore says, it's great to have someone who can

save us stumbling thru the net and falling into traps, actually that's just what this forum does 24/7.

@ Neo

Yes you can plate yellow gold on pink gold and vise versa. However I would say that you'll need to apply a thicker layer because the red in the rose gold may change a bit the color. But with only 2 micron on top of it and presto, the color is changed.

As soon as I get the rose gold from Ofrei I will plate in rose gold a president clasp I got from Paul. I received it in yello gold and will plate it with rose gold as it should be. I will post some picture of the before and after project. I hope I will have the disciplie to take picture of the whole process, but usually I get so absorbe by it that I forget to take picture of the different steps. Perhaps it would be better if I video it and later on edit the video and publish it on the web.

@offshore

I am refining the technique right now. I ordered the battery operated pen plating system from Ofrei to do fine touch plating and will continue to use the wand for larger surfaces (like for bands). I will try pretty soon their rose gold solution. I will also try their cleaner based on phosphoric acid. I discovered that the cleaner the surface is the best it is for gold adherence. Up to now, I made experiments with 24K gold. Too soft, can be easily eroded. 18K nice color like the genuine rolex (the fast gold solution from casswell) and resist more to abrasion.

The fun part about being able to plate your watches is that it is no longer a problem to possess gold plated ones. The hardest part is to find the same gold tone. Up to now, I found a perfect match between Eddie's taiwan watches and the fast gold solution from Casswell. The same solution doesn't match well with Paul's watches (at least the day-date and datejust series).Probably due to the fact that is is either 10 or 14K gold and a different allow. I am trying to find a way test the allow and the gold tone.

Cheers