Ammunition & Hand Loading > Cartridge and Shotshell reloading
Copper Plating
unfy:
I have a quart of H2SO4 from an auto part's store that I've not opened yet.
Trying to avoid acid if I can due to safety concerns.
At $3-$4, it's not that expensive either.
I'd suggest keeping your acid for a while.... if I make this work, detailed plans will go up and I'll prolly offer to sell kits :)
Just woke up, need coffee and gotta hit hardware store. Will make the last two cells and go about a plating attempt with just the 6. If 6 works, then 10, if 10 works, then 20.
100 is the ideal number to get to, 50 preferred, but 20-25 might be an acceptable number depending on how long it takes to plate for casual plinking (100 rounds a week).
Power requirements, revisited, are 12 amps per square foot of surface area. Each bullet is just under a square inch. This gets me 12 bullets per amp of power I provide. I might be able to hit 25 - 35 bullets with what I got, I dunno.
00BUCK:
I doubt i would ever do my own plating. If you find that you might use this let me know. I have no need for it but just can't bring myself to dispose of it.
skydve76:
How does barrys do it? I was thinking they started with melted copper..
unfy:
Berries undoubtedly uses a huge commercial rotating drum where the anode (source) is within the drum... instead of the other way around.
They also undoubtedly use neato chemicals i'm not gonna come within 5280 feet of (stuff like arsenic is common in plating)... as well as aforementioned acids and stuff.
buck: awwwww... buy if it works, it'll be easy and make for cheap plated rounds :P.
having been sitting with a drill and wire brush for a while polishing the donor plates is ... a bit harsh, particularly when some of the copper i was using was badly oxidized from a year ago (several thousandths of an inch of green crusty ick heh).
one more donor plate to clean up.... and then to eyeball old solution i've got laying around and then to decide if to make fresh or try to recycle.
er... doh.... will only be doing four cells tonight, forgot to cap the two cells cut earlier. oops.
unfy:
Mixed up some fresh solution. No acid.
4 cells in a make shift setup... one of them doesn't have a hanger/bullet cause it wasn't plating for some reason... dunno what's up with that, gonna have to figure it out (either the bullet or the hanger i suppose).
It was about 23min of plating... came up with 3 nice bullets:
Wiped down the crud off of the donor plates, should make re-buffing them simple next time around (even a hand brush will prolly do fine). Looked very much like used toilet paper after an upset stomach...... *cough*.
Next up: 10 or more at once. It'll be a week or two though. Want to build some stuff to make it more friendly to work with (ie: get a whole saw attachment, some 1/4 inch plywood, etc).
Also going need to figure out a better way of hooking the donor plates to power. The small alligator clips aint gonna cut it. I like being able to take donor plates out and clean them, as well as being able to dump the copper sulfate solution back into an air tight container. There are some copper washers at the hardware store, or maybe just use the larger copper clips... I dunno. I'll eyeball stuff and ponder.
Something else I wanna ponder... since I'm going ahead with the plywood and stuff... I wonder how hard it would be to build something to make lowering the bullets into the solution all at once with power turned on simpler.
Will be replacing the copper tubing I'm using now with just some generic all thread or aluminum rods or something. Nice and rigid. Also, if its something with a flat surface, might make the clothespin clippy things stay in position easier.
If I take, say, some all thread posts going vertical.... and use a couple nuts to position the lowered limit ... place a hook ... errrr.... i'll have to just draw something. Anyhoo, ya got the 4 posts at the corners, and then hooks at 'raised' position and hooks at 'lowered' position, might not be too hard to just pick it up and move a grate populated with clothespins from up high to submerged position.
Kinda like adjustable shelving.
edit:
Actually a rope and pully system would do just fine. Here graph paper :P
While at hardware store, saw a 5-6amp 12v dc power supply for $20. cheap :). Was supposed to be for 'use your 12v car stuff anywhere!' kinda thing.
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