[Amps] Silver plating

[EVonvaltie@aol.com]

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
---