Nickle Plating.

It's taken a while to move from pickling to plating parts, mostly because I've spent what little spare time I've had riding my Sportster. This weekend I decided to rectify things and plate the hardware for the gearbox mounting.

First step was to thread the nickle anodes onto some copper wire and hang around the sides of a 5 litre bucket with 4.5 litres of distilled water.

Then I added the chemicals, the last lot I added didn't want to dissolve but patient stirring and turning the heater back on sorted that out.

With the chemicals fully dissolved I stuck a piece of box section in as a test piece and connected the battery charger via the simple rheostat provided with the kit.

About an hour and a half later I had a nearly completely nickle plated box section. The darker area is the part that wasn't covered by the electrolyte and so didn't get plated.

That was as far as I got yesterday, today I moved onto plating some actual components. Starting with the pickle....

...then rinsing, the ultrasonic bath is probably a bit OTT.

Then attaching to the piece of box section I used as a test piece....

I then put them in the electrolyte and attached the battery charger. This is what they looked like when I took them out of the tank. I was expecting a more shiny finish but they came out matt.

However a bit of time spent with a buffing mop on my dremel and they came up nicely (even if it is difficult to tell the difference in photos.

I then did the other gearbox mounting parts so now I can mount the gearbox, although I'll be giving everything a proper polish using my adapted bench grinder first.