Firearms Talk banner
21 - 40 of 40 Posts
You can get the gun plated professionally for what you will pay for the chemicals to experiment. Look for someone who does automotive plating. They have all the equipment for surface preparation. You will have to strip and reassemble the gun yourself. A friend a got a HD timing chain cover & derby cover chrome plated for $50. They did a good job, the part looked like new. You will have to pay a bit more for nickel plating but they will do a better job than you can at home.
 
You ask "Why?" . . . I ask "Why not!"
You can get the gun plated professionally for what you will pay for the chemicals to experiment. Look for someone who does automotive plating. They have all the equipment for surface preparation. You will have to strip and reassemble the gun yourself. A friend a got a HD timing chain cover & derby cover chrome plated for $50. They did a good job, the part looked like new. You will have to pay a bit more for nickel plating but they will do a better job than you can at home.
I set up a small electro-plating rig when I was in charge of the lab at work. Had to buy several chemicals, special containers for those chemicals, salts, power supply, etc. - it was quite a project. Then some genius called the EPA and they came in and shut the whole thing down due to not following their guidelines; it was cheaper to send the stuff out than to comply with the rules.

Unless you want to start a rather dangerous hobby in some area isolated from your living quarters, I would advise you to send the parts out and have a pro do it for you. And those pro's are getting fewer, thanks to that same EPA - -
That's why not. I once worked for a company that did their own plating. After seeing the mess, and smelling that awful smell that the plating dept. put off, no thanks. It was also rumored that the guy who was in charge of that dept., who had been doing that job for a while, had some health issues because of it. For sure, he was not right.
 
The Texas Platers kit uses a small bottle of plating gel, some wires, a brush, and a DC power supply. It doesn't stink, you can wear rubber gloves, and it works well. When finished, wash & dry the brush and put the top on the bottle. The EPA won't bother you, and it's not dangerous.
Oh- and it's very inexpensive.
 
A couple years back I purchased a gold plating kit to re-plate the trigger of a Browning A5 I was refinishing and it came out pretty nice. The only complaint I have would be that it had a pretty short shelf life and since I was not going to use it again for quite some time, did not seem to be so much of a value to me. I guess I can always purchase more liquid if need be since I still have the electronics that came with the kit but it might seem better to have things done by a prof. especially if you don't have a lot of stuff needing plated on a consistent basis..?

RC
 
Here is the information about my kit: Caswell Plug-N'-Plate kit PNPG12 (24ct Gold Plating Solution) 4 month shelf life..

From the website:
We offer two brush plating systems:

Plug N' Plate® Gold - An inexpensive gold plating solution. (4mo shelf life)
FastGold - Plates faster, deeper/richer color and has a 1 year shelf life.

It has also become very expensive since I bought it back in 06.


RC
 
I'll give it a shot on a quarter... It's still all liquid but the bottle is discolored inside where the remaining liquid has been sitting lol... I'll report back and let ya know how it works out.

RC
 
Using electro plating I have copper plated lead bullets. All you need is a positive and a negative charge and the right metal in solution for the plating process. I used old chargers from dead cell phones as my power source. It is very simple to do and very hard to get acceptable results. Youtube will have tons of examples. good luck
 
There is no "finish" with plating.
Whatever finish is on the metal will be the finish after plating.
Electroless nickel, properly applied holds up as well as, or better than electrolytic nickel.
 
21 - 40 of 40 Posts
This is an older thread, you may not receive a response, and could be reviving an old thread. Please consider creating a new thread.
Top