wrote in message
...
For work, I found a very useful gadget that may work for some marine
apps too. It is a "Brush Plating" kit from a company called Caswell.
Basically, it is a tiny power supply and some chemicals and a set of
"Brushes" that allow you to brush on metal plating to small parts.
The kit has gold, nickel, bronze, chrome and silver chemicals. it
includes some pens that really look as if they will work for fine
details but I have only used the coarse ones so far.
As an experiment, I took stainless shim stock and used one of those
engraving pens to sign my name in cursive impressed into the steel.
Then I brush plated over this and then rubbed the shim stock on a flat
surface (a granite surface plate) on fine abrasive paper leaving shiny
steel with very pretty gold cursive writing on it.
One very interesting product they have that I have not tried yet is a
boron nitride plating system. Boron Nitride (BN) is a very hard
material for wear resistance. I could imagine using it for gun
barells etc and other wear applications. I wonder if you could coat
props with it.
Another interesting possibility is to apply Titanium Nitride to
surfaces such as props. TiN is another very hard material that
happens to be a good electrical conductor. it has to be applied in a
vacuum system and not by plating.
I have always wanted to find some marine application of the stuff I do
for work so if anybody can think of any good apps for precision
plating, let me know.


While twiddling my thumbs at work I often daydreamed about doing stuff like
that.
We built several TiN coating machines (reactive sputtering) for various
industries. The problem was that the geometry of the contracted systems
really didn't accommodate things like boat props. But, not that I didn't
try.
I did a bunch of steel hardware parts (nuts, bolts, cleats, etc.) and
gave them away to people at the dock.
They, of course, assumed the parts where gold plated.

One of the systems we built is used (or was used) by GM for "gold plating"
the metal hood emblems. Wasn't gold ... it was carefully controlled TiN.
GM was very critical of obtaining the proper color and hue. Also did a
bunch of plastic badges, etc.

The problem, I think, would be cost. In order to get the uniformity
required on different geometries, the vacuum system and components would be
very expensive.

Eisboch