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Richard Casady

On Fri, 17 Oct 2008 09:01:19 -0700 (PDT),
wrote:

On Oct 17, 11:49 am, jim wrote:
wrote:
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.

You have to be careful combining metals in a marine environment. If you
don't know what you are doing you could be creating a battery and ruin
stuff rather than protecting and beautifying it.

Scented plating, now that is a new one on me.
I never considered plating on fishing equipment. Are you sure the
plating isnt simply a silver colored paint? I am sure it cannot be
real silver which would tarnish too easily.
If you look at a lot of marine stuff, you will find that it is often
brass with a bright nickel coating. Yes, you would have to be careful
of the galvanic series so you do not cause corrosion.
One of my many schemes has been to develop a way to prevent props from
fouling because most antifouling coatings do not last long enough to
be useful. I noticed that when I have the shaft zinc in place, a
bronze prop fouls. Without the zinc it fouls very slowly. This tells
me that the nearby zinc is suppressing Cu ions from going into the
water and protecting the prop from fouling. Simply copper coating the
prop will not work if you use a zinc. What I need is a copper-zinc
coating with an underlying insulating coating on the prop.
Too many interesting things to do and not enough lifetime.

They have copper zinc coatings. They are called brass plating.

Casady