Gold plating kits?

[Jim R.]

I recall that there was some talk about electroplating at some point in the past, but I thought I'd ask here on the new forum so that the answers would be more readily available.

I'm interested in getting a kit, decent quality but not too much money that will allow me to do gold plating of some parts -- mostly for cosmetic reasons, but not necessarily exclusively.

Also, I have heard of "hard gold" plating and wonder if this is different from other kinds of gold plating, if it's an alloy of some kind, and what the differences might be.

Most pieces to be plated should be fairly small and can't imagine anything larger than possibly a transformer bell at the very largest, and certainly nothing like an entire top plate.

Thanks,

Jim

[Doc B.]

Hey Jim,

Caswell Plating is a good resource. I have used their inexpensive plating kits to good effect on watch cases, trying both the copper and the nickel solutions. The solution for gold plating is quite a bit more expensive then the other metals, like maybe $50 instead of $15 for a pint. And it has a shelf life of something like six months, IIRC. So I think the best bet might be to first prep a bunch of parts that you want to gold plate, so you can plate them all at once.

[Jim R.]

Doc,

Great, thanks and especially for the information about the shelf life of the gold solution -- didn't know that.

I'll check them out right now.

-- Jim

[John Roman]

Hello Mr. Rebman,
Was just cruising the archives and found your post. Wonder if you choose Caswell and what your experience was like?
Regards,
John Roman

[Jim R.]

Hi John,

After doing loads of research, I am convinced that Caswell is the way to go.  For my purposes, the plug'n'plate kits for nickel and 18k fast gold, plus the stainless steel activator and stainless blackener will cover 99% of my needs, and there are a couple other things that I may need to go to the flash copper and electroless nickel kits, but that remains to be seen.

I haven't bought anything from them yet, but will do so sometime in the next month or two -- depending on cash flow.

-- Jim

[John Roman]

Thanks Mr Rebman!