The other thing with the MSDS from Caswell is a number of them provide almost no information. They just use the "proprietary ingredient" disclaimer.

Caswell recommends experimenting with short tubes of copper to get your feet wet on your plating setup so I suspect the copper is not supper toxic to your bath or they wouldn't recommend it.

I have both copper and brass wire. I may have to go back and run some test with both to see if the results differ...

I have also had issues with the shadowing effect of irregular parts. I believe that can be a challenge to overcome. I believe you have to come up with ingenious anode (not cathode?) shape to eliminate shadowing

This was an interesting read too

http://www.scott-yoo.com/other/electroplating.html

Ok, I took another shot at the strut caps. I took pictures of the previous results. The first cap had some dull plate on it. So I added a 1/2 TBspn of brightener to the tank (3 1/2 gallons) . Then continued plating. It was sort of an experiment to see if I could brighten the plate part way through the process. The answer is ...no.

The one on the right side of my hand is the second cap I plated. It was much brighter and plated out pretty good. There were a few sections that I would have liked to be shinier and that may be from the leaving them in the pickle too long. I may try skipping the pickle and see what kind of results I can get.

It was interesting that the backside of both of them plated pretty good. I wonder if this has something to do with the shadowing effect making the plating finer

I also experimented with the way I tied them because of the issues I had the time before this one. I found no difference this time. In actuality the one I plated with the wire through the hole did better but probably because I added brightener. I also used a fresh piece of copper wire. So it was either bad prep or a contaminate on the wire.

So on this last past, I took the dull cap and started over..

I also switched away from the wire wheel I have been using. I was concerned about contaminants on the wire wheel. So I switched to a 3M ceramic brush. The yellow brush I am using is 80 grit, which doesn't give me the finish I want. It really needs to be finer. I am still working on that. I have the green one too but it is 50 grit.

I had problems with my chromate tanks being too cold last time. This time, I had moved them into my shop, then I put them on heating pads to heat them up, which didn't work. I am going to use some larger tubs and use a hot water bath to get them to a decent temperature. When they are too cold the reaction seems to really slow down.

I also bought a quart of brightener, so won't run short anytime soon. If you need some PM me, we can work something out. The 4oz seemed too small and the next size up was the quart. So a quart it was...

Blasted it and brushed it. Tried to pickle it until the bubbling stopped but 10 minutes later it was still bubbling

This picture is part way through the plating. Are any of you other platers getting brighter plate than this right out of the tank?

 

This is after the blue chromate

These are after yellow chromate

They are not awful but they could be more evenly shiny. I did notice when I dried them that seemed to get a lot or red sheen to them. I don't know if that was accidental or some issue of my technique. I am going to continue to work on the details...It's all in the details!!!

 

 

Found what I was looking for

Nice video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmn94B5UUuU

 

On 11/27/2017 at 10:10 PM, 240260280 said:

Nice video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nmn94B5UUuU

 

If my notes are correct, this is what I gleaned:

Yellow Chromate

10 Oz/Gal Sodium Dichromate

1/2 Oz/Gal Sulfuric Acid - battery acid

He plates for 15 minutes or so

He is using Caswells plating solution and hasn't done anything other than add make up water

Plating grade Anodes

Using Caswell Brightener

Blue Chromate:

.8 Oz/Gal Sodium Dichromate

3.2Oz/Gal Nitric Acid

I fired the plating bench up today...

I took the other strut caps to start with and bead blasted them. Then I took one of them and sanded the flat face with 320 grit paper

I put them in SP degreaser; then water bucket rinse; then to the plating tank.

I skipped the Pickle tank because I thought it was causing a rough finish on my parts

After the plating tank, spray rinse then I put them in the Chromate tanks

Blue for 30-60 secs, spray rinse and yellow for 15 secs

The sanded one is on the right in the above photo

I added a hot water bath for my chromate tanks to keep them warm

I have a bucket heater we use when doing tile work in cold weather. I warmed up a bucket of water and poured it around the bottom of the chromate tanks

I had to heat them up 3 times during a 9 hour or so plating session

I worked on plating hardware on Cody's Su's for most of the day

This is after bead blasting...

I have a very fine bead in my blasting cabinet right now, so I skipped wire wheeling these items

 

for

This is the result. After they hang a little while I use a heat gun and finish drying them the rest of the way. After working at reassembling the SU, which is quite the puzzle, this is what I've got...

 

Before on the right, after on the left

 

 

 

Very nice... like jewels.

55 minutes ago, Patcon said:

If my notes are correct, this is what I gleaned:

Yellow Chromate

10 Oz/Gal Sodium Dichromate

1/2 Oz/Gal Sulfuric Acid - battery acid

He plates for 15 minutes or so

He is using Caswells plating solution and hasn't done anything other than add make up water

Plating grade Anodes

Using Caswell Brightener

Blue Chromate:

.8 Oz/Gal Sodium Dichromate

3.2Oz/Gal Nitric Acid

He also circulates the solution... probably a filter in there too. 

He bags the anodes with a permeable membrane to prevent particles and impurities  from floating away and contaminating the solution.

15 minutes ago, 240260280 said:

Very nice... like jewels.

Thanks, I was bummed after my last season but was really pleased with the results from today. It is a slow process though. I string parts but it still takes a while to do a group of parts. I need to make a barrel plater. I could do much larger batches that way

15 minutes ago, 240260280 said:

He also circulates the solution... probably a filter in there too. 

He bags the anodes with a permeable membrane to prevent particles and impurities  from floating away and contaminating the solution.

You are correct, he has a pump in his tank which is quite large with a filter setup. I was wondering what he used  for bags over his plates. I was not sure how that would work...How do you know the bag will work but not block the plating action but still contain the contaminants?

9 hours ago, 240260280 said:

He also circulates the solution... probably a filter in there too. 

He bags the anodes with a permeable membrane to prevent particles and impurities  from floating away and contaminating the solution.

I looked up anode bag and lots of hits:  https://www.alliedplating.com/product/anode-bags/