Alchemy - electroforming on plastic, but really it's alchemy ;-)

[curious aardvark]

So I've been looking at electroplating for a while now.
Friend of our bought a little metal bird dispatcher widget from the states.
I made a plastic clone - it's probably strong enough, but I can break them with my fingers.

So i had another look around and found these people: http://gaterosplating.co.uk/
Turned out they are actually just a couple of miles from my house.
Phoned them up, went round monday for a chat and to buy some stuff.
One very informative chat and a few quid later I've now got a copper electroforming kit. Complete with easy to understand instructions.

setup_800x521.jpg

So what we've got there is a bucket 'tank'. With 4 litres of deionised water and a bunch of chemicals dissolved in it.
The only thing that needs doing to the solution in the future is to add a few drops of a brightener solutions when the copper plating gets a little dull - got two bottles that should last for quite some time.
If the level gets low due to evaporation I just top up with the deionised water, that and adding new copper when the original is used up is pretty much all the maintenance it requires.


There are also two slabs of copper suspended in the solution which is the source of copper for the plating.
My power source is an old battery charger, attached to a makeshift voltage controller.
The copper pipe across the top is one of the things dan showed me.
Instead of attaching the negative connector directly to the item to be plated. You attach it to the pipe. Then anything you want to plate just gets attached to some copper wire and hung of the pipe into the tank. Works a treat :-)
The duct tape is temporary I'll be making a couple of flexismart rubber clips that will hold the pipe and attach to the edge of the bucket. that way I can just lift it off and put the bucket lid on when it's not in use.

I also got a bottle of conductive paint. That works really well.
I will be experimenting with homemade paint, but for the time being this stuff works great and after painting 12 items with 2 coats each, I can't actually see any noticeable drop in volume in the bottle of paint. A little goes a very long way.

So the first finisher clones went in last night.
Here's one next to the original plastic model.

first plated finisher.jpg

fclone2_800x401.jpg

The difference in strength is amazing. I can't bend or get and kind of flex in the copper one, it is super strong. I haven't weighed them yet, but the copper one feels a lot more substantial. I'd say it's probably doubled in weight.
I've also devised several better ways to plate them than my first effort.

Took about 3 1/2 hours to get that level of coating. I upped my voltage to 0.9 once I had three on the go.

All in all I'm a very happy aardvark indeed :-)

Thoroughly impressed, both with the results, cost and the nice people at Gateros Plating.

More on my alchemy adventures as I learn and work out different uses for this process.

Next up is a small cuddling owls model, which should look amazing: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:790938

Also trying different paint recipes.
As far as copper wire for hanging the things goes. Got about 200m of cat 6 network cable under the bench. That breaks down into 8 strands of decent thickness copper wire. Stripped a couple metres down last night, works great. So in total I've got about 1.6 kilometres of copper wire - should last a little while :-)

Apart from the obvious advantage of added strength, a copper plated print has several other - not immediately obvious advantages.
Heat tolearance.
The plastic inside the copper can still melt, but it can't go anywhere. So plated items can withstand much greater temperatures than unplated.
Usage for food items. Copper is actually an amazing natural anti viral and antibacterial substance.
It'll even kill mrsa and other super bugs.

It will hold a decent edge - so expect a printed and coated knife of some kind in the future :-)

The more I think about this, the more things I can think of to use it for :-)