How to Nickel Electroplate at Home | bit-tech Modding

[Music] hello everybody today we're going to be doing something that I alluded to a few weeks ago when I made these little distro plate connectors and that is nickel electroplating now if you're here just the tutorial we do have time stamps for low so you can skip the parts that are necessary such as the parts lists and all the processes but let's have a little walk through and say why we'd want to do this in the first place if you're accustomed to PC water cooling this will be quite familiar to you because this is a nickel plated water block in my case is a 28 ETI block which I'm using in a quick Harris which also comes with a rather fancy nickel plated back plate it has nothing but extra bling factor pretty much but it does look rather nice and that's the thing most of the time PC water cooling uses are for essentially aesthetic purposes now industrially nickel plating is used very often for increased corrosion resistance especially if you're doing things like gas pipelines and stuff like that things will be nickel plated to prevent everything from reacting and corroding and breaking down now the thing is though in water cooling loops this can break down as well I could you could maybe have faulty plating or you could use an acidic solution which eats away at the nickel plating all sorts of different things would happen or you could read just be polishing your block and it kind of wears through the plating because it's very very thin after all so you might want to have to refinish it and of course this isn't the only useful nickel plating there are plenty of other things for instance on the feet of sewing machines those are nickel plated a very common process with brass taps at home you might want a nickel plate your tubing so you're doing copper tubing you might want to try a nickel plating that for the extra sort of shiny factor you want to have sort of silver tubes so there's a lot of reasoning to want to nickel plate things and the really cool thing is that you can actually do it very easily at home because it doesn't use a lot of complicated machinery or different processes that might be toxic so for that reason I think it's a really interesting thing to try learning because it's very accessible and the best bit is once you sort of get it going you've always got the solution and as long as you keep it safe so you can go back and do it quite easily in the future without having to do all the initial setup which takes a little bit of time so what we're gonna do is we're gonna just talk through a bunch of the stuff that you need to get going and then we're gonna do a little bit of plating and show you some of the things that I've picked up from other tutorials and learned along the way that have helped me out now I just want to preface that maybe not all of these items are essential but I found that from a quality-of-life perspective they definitely helped quite a bit okay first some essential one this is white vinegar you're going to need this you want it to be plain white vinegar no additional fragrances or spices added sarsens so try and get the most basic one you can and it's good because it's nice and cheap either coming sort of one gallon containers I got this one Amazon nice and simple next up you're gonna need a container I got these beakers for this process and actually they work really quite well you could buy a lot of this sort of lab equipment on Amazon very cheaply but it's great for this sort of stuff you might want to use one way you can have a container like a lid put on though I'm gonna just 3d print one to cover these up nice and simple but if you can maybe use like a lock and lock container I would say glass is good because it's going to keep it nice and clear so you can see what's going on but honestly it doesn't make a huge difference some jam jars or something will work really well for this next up you need nickel anodes now these are actually really easy to find as well you can get them on eBay on Amazon and so on they're all over interesting point though these ones here you'll notice are really quite thin this has both negatives and positives associated with it so the thing about the thin ones is that they have a larger surface area so when you're trying to make the solution like we will later this actually goes a lot faster the problem though is that they break down because they're much thinner of course they disappear into the solution much faster and then you can be left with little bits on the end and that's not so good and you're going to want to filter those out later so you probably want a beefier one like this big round when I go here or I can pick flat one that will be better for the actual plating itself in terms of power the next important one that we will need is this which is a power supply now you don't actually have to use a full-on power supply so again this is a little little Amazon it works pretty well I'm gonna be using this in the future for doing sort of anodizing Assaf so I thought it'd make sense just to get a proper one iPhone charger will do just fine and actually a lot of people will use just a few D cell batteries I think it's three D cell batteries works quite well the reason I don't really want the batteries is a they're not reusable so it just makes sense to have this for the long run and also I just want to have more control over what I can doing with it and plus this makes making the solution a lot faster because you can pump a lot more juice with one of these units get the solution to a nice dark green like this one very saturated and then you can do the nickel plating on a lower voltage quite easily optional things some funnels these help a lot because you might want to filter your solution I found by using these little thin a nose because these are the ones I first had access to I got little bits floating around inside my solution so to nullify that I just filtered them out it works quite well you don't want any bits floating around when you're doing the actual placing because it can get attached to the surface of your material and that's no good it will ruin your finish secondly you'll want some copper wire or something else similar to this that you can hang your parts from in the solution that's just gonna keep things nice and simple and I suggest just grabbing some plain copper wire any wire will do but this is nice and easy to get hold off and finally an optional one is a stirring pad now you can also get a heated stirring pad to make it go a little bit faster I found it doesn't really make a huge difference for my setup because actually my workshops kind of warm anyway and the rate of reaction with a nice concentrated solution is more than fine but you can get a heater one if you want to do that they're not very expensive and these are quite good because they keep the solution moving and then when you sort of dunk it up and down to keep everything like all the bubbles going that will all disappear quite fast so as you can see it's all pretty simple stuff but what we need to do now is get going with making this stuff because this is nickel acetate solution it starts or life has the vinegar and I'm gonna show you how to make it right now I'm making the nickel acetate solution is essential but also nice and simple basically we're trying to get all these nickel ions the solution that way when we do the actual plating process everything can be drawn from the solution into the negative which is going to be your part and that will allow it to basically plate around it so what we're gonna do is we're gonna start with pouring out a measure of a vinegar now this is just depend on how big your container is I'm using quite a small one here so this pot will go quite quickly we're also going to add some regular table salt now what this does is it raises the conductivity of the liquid and just makes everything go a little bit faster because we're dumping more ions into it don't have it too much maybe a spoon spoon or two depending on how big your containers volume is but we don't want to be crazy and we can just give it a muster all right next up you want to take one of these as your cathode and these ones as your anode now the reason I've got one for the cathode on a load for the anode is because the ions are going to be pulled from this side and go to this side so this is going to have kind of form Bend rights on it and this side is essentially going to disappear and in the process it's going to go into the solution and it will turn this lovely green color that you've got in the solution over here so what we're gonna do is we're going to put the negative on one side and then I'm going to take a bunch of these and I'm just gonna do exactly the same [Music] right next up we need to connect our power supply so the cool thing about these ones is that they do come with a size that's very easy to tech which side is the positive on which size is the negative if you're doing it with a homemade power supplier say from a phone charger over the batteries to just make sure to remember which one is which because whilst it doesn't matter right now it might be a bit impractical you get it wrong you says stuff like I have here but really silly nothing will happen but it will not be very good if you do it later on incorrect because then you won't get any plating effect at all so what we're gonna do is we're gonna take the positive I'm gonna stick it to the fat end here and then we're going to take the negative and we'll put it on the thin end and then we're gonna apply out juice so in my case I'm basically pushing in as much voltage as I reasonably can now I've set my amp limiter to be about three on this one because I don't want to put too much juice because it does actually get quite hot so having all that energy going through this small volume of liquid it puts out quite a bit of heat and I don't need to go absolutely mental so for that reason I'm just gonna limit it to the three amps on this but the thing is if you push this value up this is going to go a lot faster and you'll just you won't have to hang around waiting for it to get to a nice dark color because your plating will be more successful the darker and more concentrated is and this is why as you do this it gets better and better because basically you're going to keep dumping more ions into the solution making it more concentrated which just makes it more effective and it means you can do it quicker at lower voltages and get really good finishes so to get there we want to pump this full and so to do that quickly I'm just gonna put the settings on if you're going to be doing this slowly with a lower wattage and voltage supply it will just take longer maybe 50 minutes in the hour we should be able to leave this for about 20 minutes or so at these high settings to be able to see something happen I might leave it a little bit longer if it looks really weak but let's see how it goes so what you'll notice the moment you switch it on there'll be loads of hydrogen forming on the cathode here so you what you can collect that and do the squeaky pop test that was always good fun at school just bear in mind you don't want to be putting tons of that maybe into a tiny enclosed space as hydrogen is very flammable but realistically you're not gonna be producing enough to cause the damaging sort of consequences I think and now all we need to do is just let it do its thing so I left it for about an hour and as you can see it's gone really quite a nice and deep green color and of course the longer you leave it with more nickel going in the deeper that's going to get if you look at some commercial ones is a really deep teal so it shows you how much nickel there is in there so one thing I did mention beforehand was that you'll get deposits on the cathode and this is what I meant so you see these sort of dendrites to the form this is the nickel depositing on it and the problem with these is that they actually can fall off quite easily they're quite fragile they're very very fine and they can just fall off into the solution and similarly if you're using these thin anodes like I've got here when you take them out you'll see that they're all very sort of eaten away and that's because that's gone into the solution and then also being deposited on here which means that there's sort of residue on the bottom of the container so I've found a good way to deal with this is just to filter it out so I've got some basic filter paper got my funnel and then I'm just gonna try and basically pass it through here just be careful about how hot this stuff is because this is a very small beaker and pumping in that much juice in for an hour means that this is it's pretty hot stuff this is probably about 65 degrees or so so that's 65 Celsius so you don't really want to be getting your fingers on that or splishing it around by accident because it can perf err bit so just bear that in mind and also it smells pretty bad this is vinegar you know so there's going to be a lot of it in the air so I'd recommend doing this in a venn too late to space or outside so I'm doing this in the workshop I've got the doors wide open so everything can just fly outside much easier that way if you do this inside your house will reek so just bear that in mind it's worth considering so with our solution nicely filtered now we can almost get on to doing the plating now I say almost because we have to do some preparation so what I've done is I've just rigged up a little test piece here out of some brass and this is going to demonstrate a few different things so firstly we need to get this really really clean so if you've done any kind of machining work or sanding or anything like that that's gonna cause problems because there'll be residue on the surface and that will affect the plating it will maybe stop it from a d-ring properly you might have issues with it flaking for instance or it could bunch up in the corners and do all sorts of other things or have a staining problem so firstly what we're gonna do is we're gonna clean this now my personal method is actually use one of these little ultrasonic cleaners they're quite cheap and for small pieces are really quite handy they do lack a bit of power these ones and obviously we get a more industrial unit you'll be able to clean things far more thoroughly but actually for this sort of thing basically removing grime or any kind of that sort of work these work really well and you can just get some easy cleaning solutions that you just add to some distilled water don't use tap water because if you use tap water it's gonna have whatever pH of that is inside there so you don't have all those extra minerals floating around so some deionized water stuff that you put in your computer that will work really well for this and I've basically just put a degreasing cleaner in there so let's get this nice and clean first [Music] five minutes late Dale and actually provide it all with degreasing that we need so get rid of all the oils and you're kind of remaining this residue or dust and stuff like that however we now have a bit of a soap film so we have an alkaline soap film from the soaps inside here so what we now need to do is wash this off so this is again just more water so I'm just washing it so and get some more of it off and then we're gonna do one extra step and this is an optional one but I'll explain why it's probably a good one to give it a go because it will definitely help your plating so what we're going to do is we're going to use a thing called an acid pickle just to lightly edge the surface of the part now this is going to be very light we don't want to change the surface finish at all what we do want to do though is potentially remove any surface oxidation that's appeared on your part after or during cleaning or whilst you've been making it for instance so we want to make sure that the adhesion to the nickel is going to be as good and even as possible and using an acid pickle special on these softer metals can really help with that so one of the things that you might get if you don't do this sort of shadows and smudges around the corners and it might have difficulty deering evenly so you can get flaking for instance and obviously those are undesirable so what we're going to do is we're going to use this stuff which is some hydrochloric acid now I've got quite strong acid here so this is five molar solution we don't really need that what we actually want to something closer to not point to or similar like that so I'm going to dilute this in some water so just bear that in mind because if it's obviously too strong then you run the risk of affecting your part quite heavily so you don't have anything which is going to be eaten away or just have its own chemical reaction go crazy and stop the nickel plating so that's what we're going to do now and we're just gonna leave that in there for a short while maybe a couple minutes something like that if you need to later okay so we've let that sit for a little bit let's take it out and then what you definitely want to do is wash all the acid off so I've got a beaker of just plain water here again this is distilled water and I'm just gonna wash it off and once again and get it nice and clean so as you can see hopefully the acid has not changed the surface finish of this brass at all and that's what we want now speaking of surface finishes one of the interesting things to note is if you're going to be nickel electroplating then you're basically going to get the finish out that you put in so if you take a look at this piece here what I've done is I've actually left two different pieces because this should hopefully be able to illustrate how it comes out afterwards so we've got a polished piece at the end and then we've got some part which I've left sort of brushed and matte so they should at the end of it look kind of different now one thing that is worth mentioning is that you may not get a perfectly shiny process from this exact solution because this doesn't have any brighteners added so you can buy commercial solutions that basically are this part that we made earlier already and then you can add to that different additives so for instance if you wanted a black nickel finish there are additives for that bright nickel dull nickel all these different finishes you can have different additives that will change it so it's worth looking up exactly which ones are available in your area I did find that it does vary quite a bit region to region on availability certainly in the COBIT times it did anyway but for this particular example I'm not gonna be using any additives we're just going to use it straight out of the bat and if one of those things that I'm probably going to try experimenting with in the future of the different parts but for now we're gonna just basically leave it raw but now that we're done with this we need to prep this before doing the actual plating so this piece obviously I've just made for this example so I've got a handy hole that I've put at the end here I'm just gonna pass some copper wire through that and that will mean that I can easily attach my electrode because this crocodile clip here isn't gonna fit on this obviously so I'm going to attach it a copper wire instead and then we're going to use that for the actual plating so let's get ahead and do that so first things first you're going to take your positive connection and then attach it to your anode and that's going to be sacrificial then you want to take your negative and attach that to your part so I'm doing it slightly just above the camera view here but like so now what we're going to do is we are going to want to use a voltage of somewhere between three and four point five to five volts it will depend on how large your volume of your container is and how large your part is so this is where things become a little bit of an art form you're gonna have to work out exactly which works best for your parts so I've got quite a big container here and I've also got a fairly hefty part that's quite a volume of metal in there and a surface area is kind of high so I'm gonna be using a higher voltage I'm using 4.5 volts you might want to use lower or you might want to use higher depending on how it works this is something just unfortunately gonna have to figure out through experimenting there is an equation for it but it's also quite tricky to work out if you haven't got all the industrial steps surrounding it I've found and also if you're not making the parts to yourself it can sometimes be quite difficult to get a good idea of the surface area now this is going to be quite a crucial part because trying to get a good finish isn't as easy as you might think so firstly if your voltage is too low well you'll find is that the bubbles of hydrogen that form on your part here will grow very slowly and that will actually stop the solution from coming into contact with the metal and that will mean that your finish will not be good however if your voltage is too high say you maybe set it to something like 6 volts then it's a little bit too fast and actually the rate of reaction is very high and you can end up forming like sort of dendrites or you get very rough bubbles coming off which again stop the finish so what you want to do is have it somewhere in the middle zone and that will depend on the size of your parts and you'll have to get some experience and then you're going to want to keep it moving so what we're gonna do is we're going to switch it on now and then we're going to do it dip it in here I'm just going to keep it moving now what I've done is I've lifted a loop here so I can basically put something like this rod or a pencil across the surface and that can leave it like so what we need to remember is that because this is electroplating it's going to go from this side over to this side which does mean you're gonna have a shadow so you're going to want to move things around make sure that everything is in view of the anode otherwise you can get plating a shadow and that's no good similarly it makes it quite a difficult process to use for doing interior things so say you've got screw holes you want the insides to be plated evenly or maybe you've got channels inside a components that you're trying to replate say like a water cooling fitting or something it won't work very well so just bear that in mind the electroless plating is better for doing those sorts of complex geometry parts if you've got external geometry like this or maybe you're doing a plate or a tap or a tube that's the way to go soon after so it's only been about maybe four minutes or so and I think we've got to where we want to go with this one it goes without saying this has gone quite fast me because I've got quite a concentrated solution now but if you're doing this with a brand new one and it's not strong this it might take longer and also if you want a thicker plating you're gonna want to leave it in there for longer so this is gonna be just a quick plating just to show you how it's come out but as you can see it didn't take long at all we just got that wipe so remember what I said about the finish being the same as the underlying surface finish so you can see here we have polished and then here it is matte so that's very important when you want to do your nickel plating just make sure you have the exact finish that you want underneath and then it should come out the same on top now this is obviously very thin layers you can see it hasn't really affected this groove in the middle over here we need more time for that and a little bit of smudging on the back here from where actually the surface finished wasn't so good on the original brass piece but that's pretty impressive I think and the fact is you can put more time into it and get a really fantastic result especially if you spend a long time either polishing brushing or using other processes that will leave a very even finish on here and then that means you can get some fantastic plating results for the most part that's all there is to it it's not a particularly complicated process but it's also not really simple so you're going to want to experiment a little bit get the hang of it and then you can maybe tackle your projects now I did stress the point of cleaning the part and I thought I'd die and do an example using some spare bits so this is a copper base plate you may recall from the Eco water blocks factory tour so I was given this to take back because it failed and this just been sacked in the corner of the workshop and doing nothing for a long time as a result it's a bit filthy like it when it came back from the from the actual workshop it's alive it's a coolant on it and stuff so it was missing messy there since then it's oxidized it's got dust it has some chemical reactions for work than in contact with other things on the back so this is about the worst thing to plate and it really shows so I just did the exactly the same technique up to the voltage a little bit because is much bigger but as you can see this plating is terrible like some parts of it here there's a bit bit clean and that's actually plated okay but these corners and things like that there's basically no adhesion it's just flaking off you can take it off with your fingers and you can see where there's been oxidation problems there's coolant stuff residues or stopping things from working so if you to fully clean your part and do all pickling and other things like that that's what you're going to get so you definitely want to go through all the relevant steps interestingly enough though whilst I've only plated some copper and brass over here there are other metals that you can plate as well for instance such as stainless steel however you're not going to be able to do stainless steel straight off the bat you're going to have to first coat it in copper before you can do it in nickel and this is one of the interesting things is that this method basically works for all the transition metals so you can use the same technique to plate things with copper or to plate things with the zinc so you may want to galvanize things you can do that using this exact same method you will have to look up specifics on things like voltages and stuff for those parts but making the solutions and the techniques and largely are the same which is pretty interesting because it does mean that if you've got something like this and you want to cut copper plate it or you want to nickel plate it you can do that using the same situation and another cool thing is that obviously you don't really want to be throwing this stuff away you can use it again in the future if you just put it in something like a container which has proper lid on it it will be kept nice and safely so you don't lose a dust and stuff falling into it I'm going to be putting a little this one just keeping us on the shelf so that when I need to do the nickel plating so I can just whip it out make sure it's nice and clean and then get along with the plating one little parting point if you're having trouble getting the bubbles on the surface of your part to disperse them use one of these to help you out which is a magnetic stirrer soak a little flea down in the bottom there and basically it keeps the liquid moving around the part which can pull some of the bubbles away so instead of having them grow quite large interrupting the plating process they just get pulled off the pot and keeping things nice and fresh and also that's quite a good idea if you've got say lots of little parts here because otherwise you're going to feel like you know Gepetto the puppetmaster filling them up and down and moving them around like that this can keep it a little bit more even and make your process a little bit quicker another thing is that if you have a larger anode here for the actual plating you're going to have fewer problems with shadows obviously if all the ions are sort of generally flowing from one there here's another if you've got quite a large plate on this side you're going to have sort of more even coverage it's a bit like the same idea of using a softbox with your lights if you're trying to do video work or trying to avoid harsh shadows it's the same principle it basically diffuses it the current will come from a larger area and you should get the better plating quality well folks I hope that's been helpful because I've really enjoyed learning how to do all this over the last few weeks I'm really excited to find out where I'd be able to take it in the future in regards to other things that are about me making for future projects speaking of projects you won't want to miss any of those because they are rather special indeed not only have we got this one continuing but we've got some really special ones just around the corner and you wouldn't want to miss any of that so the best way to keep up to date is of course by subscribing to the channel you also find us over on Facebook Instagram Bills Gigi and Twitter also definitely swing by the disco server linked below it's a great place to chat and get to know everyone as well as to get sneak peeks on upcoming content also on merchandise stores linked below so if you'd like to support the channel pop in and have a look and see if anything strikes your fancy take care folks I'll catch you next time [Music] you

Channel: bit-tech

Views: 333,569

Keywords: electroplating, nickel, acid, DIY, watercooling, pcmodding, casemod, plating, metal, copper, how to, tutorial, plating at home, repair

Id: 1Uy7QkLI8yU

Length: 28min 21sec (1701 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 17 2020