Looking pretty good their my friend. Kudos.
You are making progress, I like to see that!
The very strange thing to me is that in the same bath where the leaf is plating astonishingly well radiating out perfectly and I am plating a plastic vase that is doing well I cannot plate brass or silver wires that I have hanging in there with them to test things. I wonder what that explanation is!
Is it possible the brass and silver have anti-corrosion coatings?
I sand them off before I use them. For sure they do.
My piece of plastic copper feels like metal and looks like metal and sinks straight to the bottom if you let it go. I’m sure that copper plating adds a lot of strength to the item and weight. I can bend it more without it snapping than it was before.
My leaf lost all it’s paint on one side. After that happened it quit plating. I dried it out in my food drier and painted everything again even over the copper. Then I painted another leaf and put it in and it started plating on one side right away. I am waiting for them now to see what has happened. I can’t believe how fast the cathodes get eaten up but I collect the copper dust that they leave.
I think I will make a plating brush.
Nickel plate comes after Xmas. I do get zinc today if Amazon is right. I have my acetone too.
If I was looking to do this, bearing in mind my previous experience, I would absolutely go the electroless plating route. It’s just so much easier, and reliable.
This is fun. It is very interesting and creative. I’ll get the hang of it with a lot of trial and error and a few youtube videos.
I got to try a bit of acetone and graphite as a conductive paint and it works very well and costs far far less than that $50 half a shot glass of paint that was only half full and barely works. It’s already used up and I barely did anything. It dries almost immediately in front of your eyes and the exhaust fan makes it imperceptible.
I think I am going to have to hit my leaves and organic stuff with a shot of hairspray. I ran out of graphite and used the copper and silver dust I collected and it works very well. Certainly better than that expensive stuff but maybe not as good as graphite, we will see. I think they sell copper dust / powder.
I painted a tiny PLA vase with my concoction and it is just completing being fully and smoothly covered in about 5 or so hours, though I will inspect it and remove oxides and plate it longer.
I am not in a hurry to perfect all this because then I will have to fix my printer and I have been procrastinating on that for a year or so.