Zinc electroplating

[RoamingGnome]

Wow! @Jancoe That is impressive...

[Eugen]

@Jancoe what did you use for the bath and power source and for how long? My small part yesterday cleaned to bright metal in about 95% of its area, but the rust wasn't scaled. I left another few parts going overnight outside the shed but haven't checked on them yet.

[Jancoe]

Power source is an old sears solid state 10 amp charger. Washing Soda bath solution. This particular hitch I ended up running in the tank for 48 hours. It was heavily rusted. I've done a handful of items so far and I've figured out that my anode rebar setup was too small for this particular hitch. Other parts I've done only took 12 hours. I'm sure if I had more anode in the tank the process would have taken less time. The smaller parts I've done did not take as long and was nowhere near the condition this hitch was in. I still have my 4016ps torn into a million pieces to restore. I wanted to try the process on the frame and see how much it would also strip the paint off.

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[Eugen]

Thanks! I can tell you that there were parts of the fittings that I did with remnants of paint on them. Electrolysis did nothing to the painted parts. Maybe you'll have a different experience.

One thing I wanted to say about using electrolysis with a vinegar and salt bath like I tried. It's very aggressive very quickly. It eats away at the metal if left too long and unsupervised. I'm going back to washing soda.

@Jancoe how did you deal with the generated foam. When I did this a few years ago I did it at work and had to clean up the foam constantly. Did you perhaps add something to the bath to not foam that much?

[Eugen]

@Gordy , sorry, I was not able to reliably measure the thickness of plating. Maybe because it very thin.

[Seabee]

I am just following along from an interest standpoint.

Bill Moyer