Neissa Industries

So, I fianlly recieved my chemicals from Alfa Aesar. I then went about mixing up the nickel plating solution based off the formula I gave in the previous post. After the addition of of deionized, distilled water, the solution had its characteristic green color and was crystal clear.

Freshly Mixed Nickel Plating Solution

To this solution I placed my Nickel supply in the form of a rod. Nickel is an expensive element. If you have ever looked in the chemical catalogs for 99% Ni it can cost hundreds of dollars for a very small amount. For the small amount of plating that the average amateur electroplater will be using this is very impractical. However, there is a source of Nickel that everyone can get there hands on: Nickel welding rods. Nickel welding rods are commonly used to repair cast iron materials as a filler. They can be found at many local welding shops which sell them by the pound. In my case for 5 welding rods it cost about $20, a bargain compared to the $100 dollars I would have been forced to pay the chemical companies. Sometimes though, at least in my case, the only form of Nickel welding rods carried are the ones that are coated in a thick grey flux covering. Do not be discouraged! Theses will still work all that needs to be done is remove this coating. I experimented with many forms of removal: soaking, wire wheel, chipping. All of these methods worked to some degree, soaking softened the coating but did not remove it, the wire wheel worked but sprayed the dust everywhere and took forever, and chipping  was just a pain. In the end however, I found sometimes the simples method works the best. Just crunch it off! I have a cheap radio shack wire crimper that looks like a big black pliers. All is did was bite down on the coating and it came right off. After this they were cleaned with soap and wiped with alcohol before being ready to go.

We now have our bath and a source of nickel. After some experimentation I found that having two rods of nickel one on either side of the part yielded a much better even coating which makes common sense. The amperage that one uses is dependent upon the surface area of the part to be plated. Every type of bath has its own specific plating current per square inch or sometimes foot. After selecting a sample part, prepping the surface and performing the necessary calculations it was immersed in the bath.

Plating Bath in Action!

Here are some before and after shots of parts I have now plated:

Before

After

As can be clearly seen there is a noticeable improvement in the quality of the bolts as the protective coating is applied. Over the course of my plating experience during the past few weeks I have learned a few tid-bits that could benefit some others.

1. The amount of time is directly proportional to the thickness of the plating. Longer times = thicker = more rust resistance. On average my parts plate for one hour and they do not show signs of rust. Short times can start to surface rust
2. If the plating is cloudy, this can be avoided by performing a hot entry. That is, with the current on lowing the parts into the solution.
3. Brighteners are used up. When the parts become duller you need to add more brighteners but be careful you only need to re-add primary brighteners. Carrier brighteners are not used they just transport the ions where as primary are burned by the current to allow for the bright plating
4. Agitation greatly reduces the amount of pitting due to hydrogen bubbles
5. Use must filter you solution every so often to make sure it is clean and healthy. Small amounts of iron oxide will collect in the solution and settle to the bottom over time. These will contribute to a poor quality of plating. To filter all that is needed is a wide poor filter. Do not use charcoal. Some professionals will use it however in my experience all it does is collect my expensive brighteners. Coffee filters work fine or anything in that range. Don’t use to fine a filter paper or else you’ll be sitting there pouring the solution all day!

With this advise you should have a good idea on how to make your own plating solution. Next up is adding in other elements to form alloys allowing for better properties. Stay tuned!

In the process of restoring my Honda CB350 the wiring harness was looking pretty “tired.” New old stock, NOS, ones can sometimes be quite expensive and even then are not in great condition. Why pay for something that still works perfectly well to start with. To begin I removed the wiring harness from my frame. Here it is after removal, covered in grease, dirt and god only knows what.

Before Restoration

After disassembly the covering was stripped off the harness revealing the internal wiring, which to my surprise was in great condition. The wires were soaked in a workshop sink and washed to look shiny and new. After this they were reorganized into bundles and wrapped with a single strip of electrical tape to hold together while the covering is placed over it. Here is a photo showing the complete harness after washing and wrapping.

Harness after scrubbing

Too this now cleaned and prepped harness a covering was added. There are many different forms of covering with each person you ask having a personal preference. There seemed to be three main types of covering that the vast majority of people use. These are:

1. Heat Shrink Tubing
2. Self Fusing Silicone Tape
3. Expandable Mesh

All three have pros and cons to them. After some research I decided to use a combination of expandable mesh and self fusing tape. This I believed would give the wiring harness a modern feel with some modern protection, which I greatly like the thought of.  Now there was one trouble section on my harness. That is the middle section, as the harness is like a tree with limbs growing off the main shoot, is not easily accessible and therefore unable to slide the mesh sleeving over. I therefore utilized a wrap around mesh tubing which should allow me access to the harness wires should one of them needed to be repaired. The two types of mesh along with the tape was ordered from McMaster Carr a fantastic site with basically everything you will ever need. One word of advice I decided to get the easy cut tubing which resists raying since I do not have a hot knife. I would strongly recommend that everyone that does not have a hot knife buy this kind.  The ends will fray but no where near the amount the regular mesh will.

So the mesh was slid on and the joints were wrapped in tape to prevent fraying and protected the vulnerable bends in the wiring. Here are some photos of the now completed wiring harness ready for re-installation on the bike frame.

Expandable Mesh

Wrap Around Mesh

Complete Wiring Harness

Overall the wiring harness looks hundreds of times better than it did before hand. However, I am not sure about the wrap around mesh. It looks decent but somewhat disorganized while the regular expandable mesh looks fantastic. I will leave for now though I expect in the future I may be replacing it with just a wrap around loop of tape like the harness had before. But for now this will work.

Modern day electroplating has been around for slightly over a century. In today’s world nearly every part we see has some form of protective coating on it, whether it be paint or some form of metal treatment. Electroplating is the process of applying a different metal on top of another metal by use of electricity. The plated metal will have the desired properties, which can include: corrosion resistance, beauty, reflectivity etc. The three most commonly plated metals are Nickel, Chrome, and Silver. Whilst silver is only used for looks both Nickel and Chrome are used for corrosion resistance.

In many of my projects I have found the need to protect steel parts from rust and provide a much more durable aesthetic coating. Up until now whenever this has been necessary I have just sent my parts out, which are mainly small and fit easily into boxes, to large, local plating shops. Whilst this has not been the cheapest option it has guaranteed a professional coating.

Whilst Chrome plating particularly hard chrome plating is possibly the most difficult form of plating because it requires three plating steps, copper, nickel, and finally chrome. This makes the entire process time consuming and expensive. For my purposes Nickel plating will provide enough protection and a nice looking finish.

Nickel plating solutions have been around since the early 1880′s. These solutions were originally more popular then the modern day chrome since they were easier, quicker, and cheaper to utilize. Over the course of the past 120 years however, very little progress has been made in the way of improving these solutions or baths as they are called in the trade. The most recent improvement came in the mid 1940′s with the addition of brighteners to the baths which allowed for bright nickel plating. This cut down on the labor to polish the piece after plating. The most traditional and still most popular bath is called the Watts Bath. This is comprised of a simple solution of Nickel Sulfate, Nickel Chloride, and Boric Acid in varying proportions. Now, most modern day brighteners are a variety of sulfur bearing compounds. Whilst these are effective in the amounts used in plating shops around the world. They are expensive and most baths require a mixture of many compounds to obtain the desired surface finish. These factors make them impractical to the small scale home or hobby user.

To formulate my Nickel plating bath I began by searching around the patent office to see what existed. There have been many different ideas in the way of improving these baths to start with I came up with a general formulation of a Watts Bath. This bath contains:

All measurements are in grams per liter:

• 412.5 grams of nickel sulfate
• 75 grams nickel chloride
• 41.3 grams of Boric Acid
• Add Distilled / Deionized Water to 1 Liter

To this bath I have chosen to add two brighteners that seemed to repeatedly crop up.

• 15 grams of Sodium Naphthalene-1,3,6-trisulfonate
• 0.2 grams 2-butyne-1,4-diol

To this relatively simplistic bright nickel plating bath I have decided to test a variety of other additives to enhance performance or replace multiple brightener chemicals with fewer chemicals to ease cost. These tests will include:

1. Addition of sodium tungsten oxide to increase durability of coating as seen in patent #2432893
2. Replacing traditional inorganic and organic brighteners with enzymes such as pepsin from patent #2703311
3. Addition of organic acids to aid in deposition of even bright coating patent #2818376
4. Addition of anti-pitting agents e.g. Sodium lauryl sulfate

To start I have ordered the above chemicals from Alfa Aesar a research chemical company located right here in my back yard. Once these chemicals arrive I will formulate the solution and begin testing electrodes / cathodes and current densities. Stay tuned for the next installment in about a week.

A few weeks back whilst visiting Harbor Freight tools I purchased a new 40 lbs. pressure pot style abrasive blaster. Whilst these blasters have received a mixture of reviews, I truly needed a sandblaster in my shop to work on some of my restoration projects. Knowing what I had just purchased could be a piece a junk I took it home and assembled it.

Assembly:

Firstly, because the parts are coated in disgusting brown preservative oil to protect them from rust whilst being shipped over from China I took my time and scrubbed each part with carburetor cleaner to make sure all the oil was removed and would not clog the blaster later. Next, I  threw out all of the hose clamps that are included in the box. The included hose clamps are utter garbage and will snap before the first time you plug in the machine. The instructions state to warp a few turns of Teflon tape around each threaded connection, I simply cannot stress enough how important this is. I have read online that some people believe that the included Teflon tape in the box is also rubbish. I couldn’t find the tape in my box until I had the unit already assembled, somehow the tape ended up in the bottom of the box, so I cannot give an honest answer to this. Other than this the assembly is quite straight forward, at least for me, and I was left with the machine pictured below.

First Run:

So here are some specifics I loaded the machine with some #8 Glass beads to clean up some aluminum parts for my motorcycle restoration (Wheel Restoration). I poured in about ~20  pounds of the light fluffy powder through the included funnel which was lined with some window screen mesh to catch any large clumps, which could clog the machine. After the addition the top was screwed shut and the air compressor turned on.

Now my air compressor is very small to power this large blaster unit. I knew this before I bought the unit. The specifications on the blaster state that it will consume anywhere from 6-25 SCFM @ 60 PSI. For a unit of this size that is about correct. Now my compressor is a small little Porter Cable pancake, which under ideal conditions will generate about 3.5 SCFM at 60 PSI. To operate this larger unit I would have to le the unit fill, blast and then stop to let the unit refill.

So once the blaster charged to 100 PSI I carefully opened the valves all the way as per the instructions and aimed the nozzle at the aluminum wheel hub not really knowing what to do. A small jet came puffing out and then stopped as I was left with a simple stream of air. After some tapping and messing with the control knobs I was able to increase the duration of the blast to just about 20 seconds.

Modifications:

After that first run I thought I had wasted my money on the unit. Upon further review though, I figured out how to make the blaster a useful tool in my shop. The most important thing I have learned is that water is your enemy. The reason many people complain about these pressure pot style blaster is that they clog. This is true due to the design of the system they are prone to clogging. The reason for this is water. When the compressor compresses air it heats the air as well. This causes the humidity in the air to remain in gaseous form and not condense like it would at colder temperatures. When the now hot, saturated air hits the colder blaster tank where it cools and decompresses the gaseous water condenses to a liquid. This now liquid water mixes with the, in this case, glass beads and forms clumps that stick to the sidewalls and clog the exit port. This prevents the blaster from outputting media to blast.

Once I had realized this problem I went about finding a way to solve it. I needed a cost effective way of removing the water from the air before it reached the blaster. There are two general ways to remove water: refrigeration and dessication. Each one has a pros and cons. I opted for a mixture of the two. My new system is as so:

The air leaves the compressor and reaches a regular 5 gallon bucket. This bucket contains a wound copper coil in which the air travels through the bucket is filled with a mixture of ice water and salt. Here the air cools to very cold temperatures which have been measured at about 20*C, slightly colder then room temperature. From here the gas which now contains liquid water hits a water trap where this water is collected. After which the now much drier gas reaches the first of two desiccant chambers entering at the bottom and travelling to the top them remove all the water from the gas which hasn’t already condensed in the bucket.

In part two of this journey I will explain how to actually construct the water removal system for you all to build your own.

Welcome to Neissa Industries!

This sight will serve to document all of my research and development in many scientific fields. I will post research and provide updates to ongoing projects I am currently working on.  I hope this sight is helpful and inspires many people who also enjoy the fields of science and engineering as much as I do. Some of this research is proprietary while I will try to post some information on it I will be unable to give critical information away. Other then that feel free to send me any questions you have on anything on this site or any science or engineering questions in general I am always listening and willing to offer a helpful hand whenever possible. Thanks for looking!