Nickel Plating Kits - your recommendations

[Zhangliqun]

For example, is this one any good for plating slugs?

PLUG N' PLATE NICKEL PLATING KIT

[RedHouse]

For example, is this one any good for plating slugs?

PLUG N' PLATE NICKEL PLATING KIT

I've used it, works fine, keep in mind you are supposed to smear the nickel on like a paint brush.

Worked much better when I used the solution and the anode clipped to the side of a small plastic dish (empty deli container) and suspened the parts in it with clip-leads like a miniature tank setup.

I've used the kits to repair small parts like corroded bridge saddles on Les Pauls, and even been doing pole pieces lately, here are a couple pics of pole pieces plated with the "Copy Chrome" kit, and you can see them installed in the customers bass's here.

[copperheadroads]

they look great Brad
i was considering buying a platter a while ago
i wonder how many slugs could you plate at a time

[RedHouse]

they look great Brad
i was considering buying a platter a while ago
i wonder how many slugs could you plate at a time

Thanks man, I've been working hard on the Rick stuff this past year, finally got it in the zone.

If you want to plate any kind of quantity parts you'll need one of the bigger kits, like this one, or the electroless nickel kit.

In fact if you intend to do any more than a few at a time the electroless kit might be best for you. The regular kit (which uses a power supply) relies on electrical contact during the process, when you have a bunch of screws in a basket it's hard to get them all "connected".

Plus they all touch each other in funny ways (HEY git yer mind out of the gutter!).

They will get a weird black'ish mark wherever they make contact with each other when doing electroplating. Some guys have gone so far as to rig up a rotating basket (think hampster cage) to ensure they tumble around in the chemical bath, but all that can be avoided with the electroless kit.

With the electroless kit you just boil-up a set of screws or slugs (or whatever) and then rinse, polish, and ship 'em.

BTW, what's a platter?

I hope this pic doesn't upset anybody, but it's a good an example of electroless nickel plating. The nickel needed to be into the slide-rails and electroplating doesn't go around corners very well so electroless was the solution. The finish was not polished before plating (not shiny) it was meant to be decorative while maintaining a matte appearance.

[copperheadroads]

Thanks man, I've been working hard on the Rick stuff this past year, finally got it in the zone.

If you want to plate any kind of quantity parts you'll need one of the bigger kits, like this one, or the electroless nickel kit.

In fact if you intend to do any more than a few at a time the electroless kit might be best for you. The regular kit (which uses a power supply) relies on electrical contact during the process, when you have a bunch of screws in a basket it's hard to get them all "connected".

Plus they all touch each other in funny ways (HEY git yer mind out of the gutter!).

They will get a weird black'ish mark wherever they make contact with each other when doing electroplating. Some guys have gone so far as to rig up a rotating basket (think hampster cage) to ensure they tumble around in the chemical bath, but all that can be avoided with the electroless kit.

With the electroless kit you just boil-up a set of screws or slugs (or whatever) and then rinse, polish, and ship 'em.

BTW, what's a platter?

I hope this pic doesn't upset anybody, but it's a good an example of electroless nickel plating. The nickel needed to be into the slide-rails and electroplating doesn't go around corners very well so electroless was the solution. The finish was not polished before plating (not shiny) it was meant to be decorative while maintaining a matte appearance.

BTW, what's a platter?

sorry its 2 AM thanks

[Zhangliqun]

Thanks guys, good info. That Electroless kit looks like the winner for me.

[Bruce Johnson]

If you don't want to mess with it yourself, my regular plating house (Van Nuys Plating in Van Nuys CA) will do them for you. They call it "basket plating", and it's used for batches of small parts like slugs and screws. The baskets are more like wire mesh drums that drop down into the tanks and are slowly tumbled throughout the immersion. They have a baseline minimum price of $75, and you can have about 5 lbs of small parts bright nickel plated for that price.

They work by mail order, too.

[Rick Turner]

I second Bruce's recommendation of Van Nuys Plating. They do all of my Model 1 tailpieces which I make in-house as well as my Rick pickup horseshoes. They do really good work.

[Bruce Johnson]

Hey Rick;

I didn't realize that you were a customer there too. Linda (the owner) tells me that a good part of her business these days is musical instrument parts. Did you know she's a big bluegrass fan? I see her hanging around Topanga every year.

Let me know if you ever have a under-minimum batch or special. You could send them to me and I could include them in one of my batches. I take parts there about every month.

[Rick Turner]

Bruce, Dave Borisoff turned me on to Van Nuys Plating back when I was in Topanga and he was still in Sherman Oaks. I may take you up on that offer. I try to run enough tailpieces and other misc. parts to hit the minimum, but there are always those times... Hey, I'll send her some music!

[jason lollar]

the caswell electroless works great if you are only doing small batches of parts- otherwise send it out to a plater but if you are doing alot of custom one of a kind work machinging your own metal parts and only doing 1 of this and 5 of that and 15 of these the caswell can do a good job if you can polish your parts correctly. i see alot of small pickup businesses building pickups with unplated steel blades- BAD idea.
If you are trying to plate a large surface and want a perfect job youll find that using the electroless- well you can get little imperfections really easily. There are tricks to getting a good plate like the orientation of the part in the plating solution and you have to keep everything clean but for plating blades where all you see is the end of it- thats easy. You rarely get imperfections on that sort of part.
I love it, it really takes your product to another level.

[Bruce Johnson]

Plating is a lot like painting.....90% of the work is in the preparation of the part before it even gets dunked. To get a good looking chrome or bright nickel surface, the bare part has to be polished and free of any scratches, dings, and file marks. Scratches won't just show through the plating, they'll often be exaggerated by it. There's no magic "spray can" that turns a rough metal part into a shiny chrome one.

I make almost all of my own metal hardware for my basses, including bridges, tailpieces, bridge covers, parts for the tuners, etc. I do all of my own polishing of my parts, and it's a lot of work. On many of them, it takes as much time to polish the part as it does to fabricate/machine it.

Some plating shops, like Van Nuys Plating, will polish the parts for you if you want. But it isn't cheap, because it takes labor. For example, my Scroll Bass tailpiece is a shaped and machined solid brass part. If I give them tailpieces fully polished, they'll chrome plate them for about $5 each, in a batch of ten. If they do the polishing and the plating, they would be $20-$25 each. The bulk of the labor is in the polishing.

The same goes for little parts like screws, slugs and blades. If you want them to look nice plated, you have to put some effort in preparing them.

[Zhangliqun]

Talked to Van Nuys plating, very close to me. Do I need to have my parts squeaky clean first or will they handle that?

[Bruce Johnson]

Well, it depends what you mean by clean. A little coating of oil, grease, or buffing compound doesn't matter. They dip everything in a degreaser first just to keep contaminants out of their plating tanks. What you want to watch out for are burrs, file marks, grinding marks and scratches. Unless you're having them polish the parts, any of that stuff will be obvious after it's been plated. You need to inspect your parts closely, looking at the areas that will be visible. For little parts, a smooth satin slightly-grained surface is okay, such as you would get from a finishing wheel, or sanding to 1000 grit. Larger surfaces need to be buffed up to a mirror shine. The hardest thing of all is a large flat surface. That has to be wet sanded and buffed to remove all scratches, while keeping it flat.

If you remember that batch of round slugs that I made up for you back in the spring, they were plated at Van Nuys Plating. After I cut off the lengths of rod stock in my Barker mill, I deburred and lightly polished both ends of every stinkin' one of them on a finishing wheel before they went for plating. The labor to deburr/polish was about equal to the labor to saw them. Although the Barker leaves a nice clean sawn end, it still wasn't good enough for plating.

[Rick Turner]

For top quality chrome plating, there are one or two other metals involved. For instance, the best chrome over steel quality has a coat of copper first on the steel, then nickel, and then the chrome. The next level down would just be copper then chrome. A flash plating of chrome over steel is bound to break down and rust over the years. If Fender parts were triple plated, they'd look a lot better after ten years (five?).

It's worth considering getting a vibrating polishing rig if you're going to do a lot of small metal parts.

On the brass tailpieces that I have nickel plated by Van Nuys, we sand them to 320 grit to get rid of any extrusion or milling marks and deburr them. I think we pay about four dollars apiece for plating when we do a run of fifty of them.