Crazy idea, we all know those aluminum pills, practically IMPOSSIBLE to get solder to stick to the end where the driver ground ring needs to be connected
I was thinking if the end of it was coated in copper, maybe using Acid Copper / Electroforming and make just the last bit copper coated if it would allow easier tack soldering to hold the driver in
Might just be more cost effective to drop the whole darn thing in a bucket and coat the whole pill (I know it won’t do anything for thermal conductivity) but might make it easier to finally get solder to stick to these daggum aluminum pills with ease
Yes, aluminum in contact with copper causes Galvanic corrosion so I suppose the zinc is there to prevent it. In electrical equipment you must install an intermediate piece between copper and aluminum cables
And while searching “youtube” ran across 500F dissimilar metal solder, aka solder aluminum to copper
I’m thinking in order to prevent overheating the driver, take the pill, clean the lip, apply the flux, run a spot or two of the uniweld, put in the driver, then use a high heat soldering iron and tack down to the pre-existing uniweld
Copper electroplating aluminum isn't as easy as I thought. Getting the plating on is easy enough. The problem is getting it to stay there. Supposedly nickel plating before copper plating works, but nickel plating could be used by itself. I'm not sure if a nickel ion solution is required. Hopefully not since nickel ammonium sulfate isn't as easy to find as copper sulfate. Vinegar seems to work. Pure nickel will be needed. That's somewhat uncommon too. Some guitar strings are pure nickel, and these solder tabs I bought a while back are too.
While vinegar may work as the solution for both, use separate solutions for nickel and copper plating or both will plate poorly.
I should know soon if this is a viable solution. Hopefully it is because it's pretty easy. Plating other surfaces seems to work well. I'll try copper plating some springs. If the coating gets thick enough, and it stays on, I'll use that instead of the spring wire mod.
Anyhow, that Uniweld doesn't have much in the way of good review. I suspect it'd ball up like regular solder instead of tinning the surface like we want it to. Solder-It looks like a better bet. This product should work more like solder paste.
Yeah…no go on the solder kit…it balls up and falls off…and only way to get it to stick is to get it REAAAAAAALY hot
Cereal_killer showed a method of using a small drill, drill thru the lip, press a plug of copper thru (like a chunk of romex) swage it in so it holds, then trim it up and solder to that little slug of copper
That should work great on some pills, but could be a problem on pills that have threads all the way to the end. With threads to the end, you can do kind of the same thing, but instead of drilling sideways through the wall, drill vertically into the wall of the pill from the bottom. Hopefully both types of plating works though since it's so easy and can look very nice. I'm hoping to make some aluminum pills that look like some sexy copper pills, and be just as easy to solder. That'll probably be as close as I get to making real copper pills since I don't see how I can fit a lathe in my future...although there is a metal lathe at the new maker space in town.
I did this quick so I didnt take pic’s of each step
drill a hole, I use a #51 bit and 18 gauge wire, swage the wire out to expand into the hole (aka beat it with a punch)
smooth the outside of the copper so it doesnt get in the way of the threads
solder to it (the solder connection is on the bottom of the driver so you dont see a solder bridge but its there), I do this by applying paste and heating with an iron from the outside
I’d love to see this copper plating method work out!
Flash plating copper to aluminum…but it’s not cheap
Perhaps a small tray to just hold the tail end of the pill in a shallow bath of the solution, then flash plate extra long some copper where the pill sits…then see if maybe it can handle soldering a few blobs to it…but it’s $170 bones for the kit
Tentative yes. Nope. There are solder bumps on the pill and they have the strongest bond I've tried so far. They're ugly though. The pill must be pulling enough heat that it hardens in a jagged bump instead of smoothing out. Next time I do it to this type of driver, I'll probably make a flat copper wire for the bridge, mostly to hide the solder. I'll see if it holds up later when I try to solder bridge to a driver. My nightmare is that the solder balls up and rolls off.
I won't be copper plating this pill since I want to get that light functional. I'll try refining the process with some scrap metal before doing it to another pill.
Edit: They appeared to bridge fine. Got three bridges, then they all came off.
I think I may have spoiled my solution by letting the alligator clips sit in solution. I'll try again, if possible, with copper sulfate for copper plating, and nickel acetate for nickel plating. If that doesn't work, hopefully the chemist in my family can help...and I'm not talking about meth.
I plated a block of aluminum with nickel, then copper. As a test, I soldered the plated aluminum to one end of a copper wire, and soldered the other end to a 1/2 pound block of lead. The solder joint held the weight with no problem, and did fine when I tried pulling it apart with much more force than a driver should ever encounter.
I followed a mix of procedures from Instructables and Youtube.
Here's the nickel plating procedure. I used solder tabs from laptop battery packs. They were tested with a magnet to make sure they weren't the aluminum that are sometimes used. The power source used was initially a bike battery power supply which has 8.4V, but I later replaced that with a 13V laptop power supply. Electrolyzing nickel into the electrolyte took a long time, probably because I was using small nickel tabs with very little surface area. I highly recommend using longer strips, multiple strips, or whatever it takes to increase surface area...or let it sit for half a day. I went back down to the 8.4V power supply for electroplating the aluminum block.
Here's the copper plating procedure. I used Root Kill (copper sulfate) from Home Depot for the electrolyte. Here's how I made the electrolyte with Root Kill (copper sulfate). I tried using a single AA for the power supply during electroplating, but it was too slow. I switched to a 14500, which was much faster, but still quite slow, although this voltage appeared to give a nice plating. Then I switched to a 8.4V power supply, which was a mistake as it coated too quickly and that part of the coating had a poor bond. Next time I'll use a usb charger for the power source.
In both procedures I made sure to keep the alligator clips out of the electrolyte.
From now on I'll use this to nickel & copper plate aluminum pills that don't have driver retainer rings.
Here you go. The 1/2 pound piece of lead is hanging from it in this picture. The copper was bright until I used the 8.4V power supply. Dark plating is weak, but still strong enough even though I didn't scrub it back down to the bright copper. It's only partially plated because I didn't feel like rotating it while plating. With a pill, it would be fully submersed because a copper wire could be put through the holes leads.
