Today's quarantine project: Home brewed zinc plating on steel parts. This is really just an old science fair project for school kids, enlarged slightly. The process is not unlike building wire spoke wheels. The results are all around us, but few of us ever seem to tackle doing it ourselves. And as with building those wire wheels, it turned out to be quite simple to do.
I found a good description of the process and necessary materials on a dirt
bike forum. I also turned to my old pal, You Tube, for pointers.
Only a few ingredients are needed to make the plating solution. Everything is available at local grocery and hardware stores. None of it is harmful. You do need some muriatic acid (HCl) to etch the steel before you plate. That stuff requires careful handling, but it was right there at the hardware store.
Hat's off to @
Havasu Dave for his help. Dave gave me a roll of the type of strip that you put on the roof of your house to control moss, repurposed in this case as the zinc source. He also gave me a low voltage DC power supply, but you can use almost anything, including one of those lantern batteries with the curly wire contacts on top.
The plating process goes like this: Clean the part throughly with a wire brush or bead blaster. Dip it into the acid for a few minutes to etch the surface. Rinse the part in water and then into the plating solution it goes. Electrodes are attached to the zinc source (anode, or positive), the part to be plated (cathode, or negative) and in just awhile enough zinc swims through the juice to completely coat the part.
I started with a random rusty washer just to see if this really works. It came out of the solution looking dull and awful, but that's just scale from the plating process. A quick hit on the wire wheel removed the scale and suddenly the washer shined so bright that it was hard to photograph.
I am pleased.
It's not really effective to spend my days restoring rusty washers, but this seems to have tremendous potential for making all sorts of things (chain adjusters, axle spacers, shift levers, etc.) look brand new again.
The detailed instructions that I followed were sent to me on a .pdf doc. Let me know if you'd like to have a copy.