Copper electroplating end of aluminum pill

Can you solder to nickel?

Found this
http://www.caswellplating.com/electroplating-anodizing/copper-plating-kits/flash-alkaline-copper-plating-kits.html

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'm looking at a source that recommends a tin plating after the nickel plating. Now I need to see if I have any pure tin in the house.

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.

SUCCESS!

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.

pics please!?

Oh wow…totally stoked, thanks!

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.

http://www.ebay.com/itm/280651340670?ssPageName=STRK:MEWNX:IT&\_trksid=p3984.m1439.l2649
Also works for alu on copper.
Solder-It alu-solder paste would be better / easier, but i found the price too high…

It might be better to use aluminum wire than copper. It may be that the copper sulfate solution would plate out first onto the copper wire instead of the pill. This is a cool project. Nice work.

The effect of current on electroplating came up in another discussion. While trying to find out how to estimate the thickness of the copper plating, I found this reference to a software/app calculator.

http://industrialmacdermid.com/category/platers-calculator/

To get the calculator, you can to provide your email so they can email the link, and presumably put you on a to-spam list. Whatever, it's worth it imo, especially if you set up an email account specifically for spam or use a temporary email address.

According to the calculator, increasing current does increase the rate of plating, but it also increases the unevenness of plating. At edges and points, plating is thicker, and possibly weak, and the unevenness appears to have a direct 1:1 relationship to current. Sometimes that unevenness works in our favor. I found when plating a pill that it plated quicker on the bottom of the pill, which happens to be where we'd solder too. Perfect!

Unfortunately it's looking like plating enough copper to the springs to make it a good alternative to the wire spring mod will take so long that it's impractical.

Still no pill, but here's a copper plated spring. This mod doing the spring mod easier because helped solder flow onto the spring better than it usually does. The brass cap is not plated. The copper plate finish is a bit rough, probably because I left it sitting in the electroplating bath for about half an hour without moving it around, but it's still a strong plate. This time I stripped a usb cable and used a cheap usb charger, which gave about 5 volts and is supposed to put out 1 amp. Plating was very quick this time. I think it's because I only put a little copper wire in the bath with the spring. So Rufusduck has the right idea.

According to the calculator I linked to in the previous post, this plate should be about 0.1 microns thick. If anyone would lend me an electron scanning microscope and a very tiny ruler, I'll confirm this. ;)

You should take 2 cheapest springs, copperplate one and then test them both in high draw light, without braided wiring of course, and let us know your conclusions :slight_smile:
BTW, do you know how strong is the bond between base material and plating material, spring is moving part,could it happen that copper layer flakes of like it can happen with nickel plating?

They'd have to be attached to the driver, but I'll probably do that. I don't think copper that thin is going to be enough for high levels of current though, but I'd love to be wrong.

It's strong enough that it survived while pulling hard on the solder wick to get it through the top of the spring. The previous weak coatings could be wiped off easily by hand.

Sweet progress!

Good work leaftye, thanks for posting your progress so far.

Electroplating for looks or solder-ability makes sense. As you mentioned, it’s just not feasible to put a thick enough plating on the spring. If that technique made sense we’d be swimming in copper-coated springs with nice spring-steel cores.

I’m looking forward to either trying the method you described or maybe some of the stuff Jerommel linked to in post #20 (which Hank says is probably “Lumiweld” or “Technoweld” or “Uniweld” in post #9 of another thread). Maybe I’ll play with both! In any case being able to solder to aluminum would be sweet.

Hopefully my experience makes it easier to start getting good plates. The other thread I mentioned about about using a hobby charger for a power supply. Unfortunately I don't have one of those voltage/current adjustable regulated DC power supplies, so I wanted to get some opinions about using a hobby charger instead since some can adjust voltage and current. It sounds like that should work. A hobby charger with motor drive would be best. My new hobby charger that does that arrives tomorrow, so for now I've been using various wall warts and that usb charger.

As far as looks, it'll probably oxidize quickly. If you copper plate the body of your light for looks, then you should protect it somehow. A thread about that came up last week...hell, you were probably in it. The one that sounded the best was a wax that museums favor. Renaissance Wax. Don't wait for me to try it though.

Yeah, I can’t really see myself copper plating something for looks right now. I did read that thread. Flashlight thermal characteristics are already bad enough without a wax coating ;-). Now if someone came up with a good way to give a nice, thin, strong black coating to copper hosts (with the idea of boosting the emissivity) I’d be interested in hearing about that.

EDIT: OTOH oxidized copper can look good (patina) and has better emissivity than clean copper. Similar to anodized aluminum according to the charts. So that might be an asthetic option with little performance sacrificed.

That's one reason I'm not crazy about it either. Aluminum has great thermal emissivity, and being black helps even more. I don't know how much a copper plating would hurt, and I'm not in a rush to find out. I do have a lantern project that I might give it a shot with though. It's a tiny lantern, but a copper coating would lend a retro feel to it, or some might even call it steampunk-ish after the copper coating gets a nice tarnish going.

if you copper plate the pill where the star sits,
can you solder the copper sinkpad onto the pill

Yes you can. It's even better if you use different blends of solder. Take any of the triple XP-G2 Convoy flashlights. It requires attaching an aluminum spacer to a brass pill. Brass solders just fine, but aluminum acts like it's allergic to solder. So I'm thinking use high temperature solder for that connection, then use lower temperature solder to attach the mcpcb to the top of the spacer.

There's another example I've been thinking of too. I feel like heat doesn't transfer from the area next to the pill up to the walls of the head well enough, so I'd like to strip that anodization, copper plate it, then add copper wires or strips up to that area. It'd be ugly as sin to look at, and might not have the thermal conductivity improvements I'm hoping for, but more thermal mass can be a very good thing when you don't have to look at it and weight doesn't matter.