Copper electroplating end of aluminum pill

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.

I’m almost tempted to ask a machinist what it would cost me to make a pill the length of the regular pill plus the spacer threaded all the way up…probably more than the daggum Convoy light, I am dying here trying to figure out how to build a spacer and keep everything lined up right…I have 8 14ga 16mm copper disk stampings…stack em up they are the PERFECT height…but that means I have to solder the entire stack together and not have them slip and slider around (solder paste should make it easier…but you know how that goes), then solder to the pill, then solder the triple XP-G2 20mm star on top of that, then drill the center for the wires…

That sounds like it'd be really nice. The cost might not be so awful either. It'd only be a couple dollars of aluminum or less if you find a better source the McMaster-Carr. The driver area would be a pocket and shelf. Doing those internal threads on the S3 would probably be the hardest, especially if you try to get them to blend into the bezel threads if they even match. I really wish I could do some machining. I'm seriously considering about taking some machining classes, if only so I know what to buy so I can learn and do it on my own at home.

If it was .1 microns thick, you would not be able to see it. and it would make absolutely no difference to anything. That is far less than a wavelength of light.

Well damn, I guess I'm actually going to have to look at the equations and make myself a spreadsheet then. At least that's something I can share to you guys if I get it figured out well enough. I suppose I should have measure the spring, but my micrometer is analog and I don't like making estimates between the lines.

Maybe it was 0.1mm and not 0.1 microns? Only off by a factor of 1000?

The calculator says "microns". Hard to mix that up. Not like µm. I think it's screwing up the distance from HCD, by which I mean it's probably me screwing it up, which probably resulted in the CD (asd) being too low.

While I didn't measure it, there were some clips the spring had to fit into, and I'm sure those clips were bent open more when the plated spring.

I'll try again tomorrow, but with a pill.

I'll learn more about the calculations later and update. That's low priority compared to actually getting some modding done, and I'm liking the spring mod much better since someone pointed out that the flux should be washed out. I followed that up with a file to flatten the top and make it fit in the brass cap, and now I'm quite happy with it. A copper plated spring would still be better, but it's not a big deal. Actually, if I copper plate the spring for others, I'm thinking about putting on a top coat of nickel to prevent corrosion. No sense having tons of copper if the contacts points are corroded, right?

I tried plating my pill again. It's a strong plate, and it's on the bottom of the pill where I need it, but I'm not happy with it. It's very much coating the ends and sharp points, and flat areas in the middle like the inside of the pill get almost nothing at all. So I have an orange and silver pill. That's fine for a pill, but that's not going to work if I want to copper plate exterior parts that are supposed to look good. I'm not sure what to do here. Maybe roughing up the surface will help.

Here's what it looks like.

http://imgur.com/a/1PKMo/embed

I also tried adapting a technique I saw from a gold plating video. I would try with nickel plating first, and wanted a metal that I could see being coated. Nickel plating on aluminum is very hard to see, so I chose to plate a penny. This technique involved a cloth covered piece of nickel moist with electrolyte over the positive end, like an electric q-tip, a penny clipped to the negative to make it accept the plate, and wiping the penny with the "q-tip". With gold video I watched, it was like painting, but with nickel it was too slow for me to see if it worked. I'll try again with copper, which I doubt will work well because copper is especially sensitive, but I'd really like that to work because it would help with plating those difficult areas.

Thanks for the pics lefteye.

What exactly are we looking at here? You discuss a couple of things in the post, so I’m not certain what is pictured.