Okay, I've done what I had to do to get all
of the Rouge out and it was a little bit tricky down on these in the knurled
areas and in the corners and stuff and so I ended up using a toothbrush and warm soapy water and scrubbed it but it's absolutely important that you get all of the
polishing material whatever it is off before you go on to this step. Now what
I'm going to use the Universal Plater and it set up for plating onto mild
steel right now with an electro-clean solution in the first beaker, a woods
nickels strike in the second beaker, and our Gold solution in the third beaker. And for the first two steps of pretreatment i'm going to... I've set the voltage at about seven just a little over seven volts. I think that'll be about right. I'm connecting my common lead to my work which will give the work a negative charge. The first step is i'll do the electro-cleaning and you can
see that it kinda bubbles on the surface and what this does is it is
like a final cleaning gets off any fingerprints or oil or anything that
could be on there and it makes the surface really wet out well. Since I had
the part pretty clean already this is just a final step to make sure that the
water doesn't bead up anywhere and that all the solutions have equal access to the
surface... that's probably long enough. Now for rinsing what I'm doing is I just got a beaker with some distilled water here. So i'll rinse the part off and now we've got our part. There's no water breaks on there, the water sheets off, it wets out very well and so next time going to leave the
voltage at 7 volts and I'm gonna grab the handle with the woods nickels strike solution. Now for this, this is the activator and it really doesn't do
anything that you can see.. its just activating the surface making it so the gold will adhere. Again I'm just going to go over it fairly quickly. Spending maybe on this part maybe 15-30 seconds... something like that. I just want to make sure I get it everywhere at lease once. That's good enough for that, and again we rinse. Now for the gold
solution I'm going to turn the voltage down. I'm gonna turn it down so the
initial voltage is about 4 1/2 volts when I begin the plating the voltage will
drop a little bit further now that we've got it down grabbed the handle we've rinsed again with the distilled water. As you can see that when i'm putting it on there the gold is immediately taking and the part is turning gold and what I'm gonna do is i'm gonna go over the entire piece fairly quickly and get just a kind of a light layer of gold on
there to protect the the mild steel so that I don't get any oxidation and
corrosion... and after i get the top layer on we will just go back and take our time... real light pressure in a circular motion. slowly advancing across the part. I hope that a lot of times when your videoing gold doesn't necessarily look all that
gold. Part looks really good to my eye. I hope it looks good in the camera. I wanna get the edge of this, the
gentleman that sent me the part actually did most of the initial polishing on it but he didn't do any polishing on the back side. However what I would do is I would
recommend that if you're going to plate it that you polish all of it, even if it's
in a areas that's not going to show. So what I'll do is I did little polishing on the back side so I'll plate the front side. Now I've gone over the whole thing
probably a couple of times what i'm going to do is I'll continue after I quit filming
this part of the video I'm gonna spend probably about a a total of five to 10 minutes plating on this. I mean it is for a gun part and the more time I spend plating the thicker
the gold will be. I want to make sure it has a nice heavy layer of gold on especially down here this knurled area is probably knurled because its
something that's going to be ya know people are going to press on it or move it with their thumb or whatever you do. I don't even know what kind of a part this is but uh. You can see that as i plate some of the purple coloring is goes out of that area of the sleeve i'll try to show that right here. And it becomes a little bit lighter and that's because the metallic components of the
solution, their depleted out of the sleeve. So when you can see that the sleeve is getting really light in color and then it's time to re-dip and get fresh solutions. Anyway, that's about it for this video. I think i'm going to stop videoing right now. I'll spend a few more minutes gold plating on
this part just so that the guy has a nice heavy gold on but that's basically how it works.