I bought a little electroplating kit a year or so ago (never tried it yet) from
a
QST add. I think it was Texas platers. They have silver, nickel gold and a
little
brush that you hook to a battery. Kind of a slow process? I don't know how thick
it is supposed to go on. I think the cost was around $15.00 to $30.00?
73
Gary K4FMX
EVonvaltie@aol.com wrote:
> While doing a major shop cleanup, I came across an old container of KoolAmp
> wipe-on silver plating powder. I recalled seeing a note about it recently,
> recommending it as a protective (?) coating on copper tank coils.
>
> I can recall using this stuff years ago to plate some copper PCB tabs before
> gold plating was as available as it is now. One thing that I can recall is
> that after 6mos to a year later what you had was very funky looking silver ,
> vs. very funking looking copper otherwise. In view of that fact that the
> coating it puts on is, at best, 10-20 millionths thick while the Copper skin
> depth is the better part of one mil (1000 millionths) at 30MHZ, its
> electrical value is nil. I believe that this stuff was intended to be used as
> a medium between LAYERS of copper, such as in bussbar wiring in plants. If
> you want to make a REALLY show-quality tank coil, here is the plan:
>
> 1. Buff it, shine it, whatever you can conjur up to make it look
> extremely nice TODAY.
>
> 2. Take it to a small PCB fab shop in your area (there are always
> several in any
> large city area) and have them apply 5-10 millionths of Gold
> plating. You can
> typically get it done for about $50-$75. If they try to charge you
> a lot more than that, it really means that they don't want to deal with you.
> The actual gold cost here is well under $10 and the process is very simple.
>
> 3. (Optiona) Spray with some high-temperature varnish. The gold will
> actually hold up pretty well, so this this might be considered overkill.
>
> It would also make sense to mount it in a way that it could be easily
> removed. You could then take it out every year or two and give it a good
> polishing.
>
> Eric von Valtier K8LV
>
> --- StripMime Report -- processed MIME parts ---
> multipart/alternative
> text/plain (text body -- kept)
> text/html
> ---
> _______________________________________________
> Amps mailing list
> Amps@contesting.com
> http://lists.contesting.com/mailman/listinfo/amps
|