electroplating

22 Articles

Can Metal Plated 3D Prints Survive 400,000 Volts?

August 25, 2021 by 12 Comments

It appears they can. [Ian Charnas] wanted his very own Thor Hammer. He wasn’t happy to settle on the usual cosplay methods of spray painting over foam and similar flimsy materials. He presents a method for nickel plating onto a 3D printed model, using conductive nickel paint to prepare the plastic surface for plating. In order to reduce the use of hazardous chemistry, he simplifies things to use materials more likely to be found in the kitchen.

As the video after the break shows, [Ian] went through quite a lot of experimentation in order to get to a process that would be acceptable to him. As he says, “after all, if something is worth doing, it’s worth over-doing” which is definitely a good ethos to follow. Its fairly hard to plate metals and get a good finish, and 3D printed objects are by their nature, not terribly smooth. But, the effort was well rewarded, and the results look pretty good to us.

But what about the 400 kV I hear you ask? Well, it wouldn’t be Thor’s hammer, without an ungodly amount of lightning flying around, and since [Ian] is part of a tesla coil orchestra group, which well, it just kinda fell into place. After donning protective chainmail to cover his skin, he walks straight into the firing line of a large pair of musical tesla coils and survives for another day. Kind of makes his earlier escapade with jet-powered roller skates look mundane by comparison.

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3D-Printed Tooling Enables DIY Electrochemical Machining

July 29, 2021 by 10 Comments

When it comes to turning a raw block of metal into a useful part, most processes are pretty dramatic. Sharp and tough tools are slammed into raw stock to remove tiny bits at a time, releasing the part trapped within. It doesn’t always have to be quite so violent though, as these experiments in electrochemical machining suggest.

Electrochemical machining, or ECM, is not to be confused with electrical discharge machining, or EDM. While similar, ECM is a much tamer process. Where EDM relies on a powerful electric arc between the tool and the work to erode material in a dielectric fluid, ECM is much more like electrolysis in reverse. In ECM, a workpiece and custom tool are placed in an electrolyte bath and wired to a power source; the workpiece is the anode while the tool is the cathode, and the flow of charged electrolyte through the tool ionizes the workpiece, slowly eroding it.

The trick — and expense — of ECM is generally in making the tooling, which can be extremely complicated. For his experiments, [Amos] took the shortcut of 3D-printing his tool — he chose [Suzanne] the Blender monkey — and then copper plating it, to make it conductive. Attached to the remains of a RepRap for Z-axis control and kitted out with tanks and pumps to keep the electrolyte flowing, the rig worked surprisingly well, leaving a recognizably simian faceprint on a block of steel.

[Amos] admits the setup is far from optimized; the loop controlling the distance between workpiece and tool isn’t closed yet, for instance. Still, for initial experiments, the results are very encouraging, and we like the idea of 3D-printing tools for this process. Given his previous success straightening his own teeth or 3D-printing glass, we expect he’ll get this fully sorted soon enough.

Electroplating 3D Printed Parts For Great Strength

March 1, 2021 by 33 Comments

Resin 3D printers have a significant advantage over filament printers in that they are able to print smaller parts with more fine detail. The main downside is that the resin parts aren’t typically as strong or durable as their filament counterparts. For this reason they’re often used more for small models than for working parts, but [Breaking Taps] wanted to try and improve on the strength of these builds buy adding metal to them through electroplating.

Both copper and nickel coatings are used for these test setups, each with different effects to the resin prints. The nickel adds a dramatic amount of stiffness and the copper seems to increase the amount of strain that the resin part can tolerate — although [Breaking Taps] discusses some issues with this result.

While the results of electroplating resin are encouraging, he notes that it is a cumbersome process. It’s a multi-step ordeal to paint the resin with a special paint which helps the metal to adhere, and then electroplate it. It’s also difficult to ensure an even coating of metal on more complex prints than on the simpler samples he uses in this video.

After everything is said and done, however, if a working part needs to be smaller than a filament printer can produce or needs finer detail, this is a pretty handy way of adding more strength or stiffness to these parts. There’s still some investigating to be done, though, as electroplated filament prints are difficult to test with his setup, but it does show promise. Perhaps one day we’ll be able to print with this amount of precision using metal directly rather than coating plastic with it.

Thanks to [smellsofbikes] for the tip!

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A Hair-Raising Twist On Infinity Mirrors

February 10, 2021 by 6 Comments

Just when we thought we’d seen it all in the infinity mirror department, [FieldCrafting] blazed a tiny, shiny new trail with their electroplated infinity mirror hair pin. We’d sure like to stick this in our French twist. Fortunately, [FieldCrafting] provided step-by-step instructions for everything from the 3D printing to the copper electroplating to the mirror film and circuitry application.

And what tiny circuitry it is! This pin is powered by a coin cell and even has a micro slider switch to conserve it. The stick parts are a pair of knitting needles, which is a great idea — they’re pointy enough to get through hair, but not so pointy that they hurt.

[FieldCrafting] was planning to solder 1206 LEDs to copper tape and line the cavity with it, but somehow the CAD file ended up with 0603, so there wasn’t enough space for two tape traces. We think it’s probably for the better — [FieldCrafting]’s solution was to use two-conductor wire, strategically stripped, which seems a lot less fiddly than trying to keep two bare tape traces separated and passing pixies.

Don’t have enough hair for one of these? Surely you could use some handsome infinity coasters to round out that home bar setup.

Low Cost Metal 3D Printing By Electrochemistry

January 23, 2021 by 78 Comments

[Billy Wu] has been writing for a few years about electrochemical 3D printing systems that can handle metal. He’s recently produced a video that you can see below about the process. Usually, printing in metal means having a high-powered laser and great expense. [Wu’s] technique is an extension of electroplating.

Boiling down the gist of the process, the print head is a syringe full of electroplating solution. Instead of plating a large object, you essentially electroplate on tiny areas. The process is relatively slow and if you speed it up too much, the result will have undesirable properties. But there are some mind-bending options here. By using print heads with different electrolytes, you can print using different metals. For example, the video shows structures made of both copper and nickel. You can also reverse the current and remove metal instead of depositing it.

This looks like something you could pretty readily replicate in a garage. Electroplating is well-understood and the 3D motion parts could be a hacked 3D printer. Sure, the result is slow but, after all, slow is a relative term. You might not mind taking a few days to print a metal object compared to the cost and trouble of creating it in other ways. Of course, since this is copper, we also have visions of printing circuit board traces on a substrate. We imagine you’d have to coat the board with something to make it conductive and then remove that after all the copper was in place. When you build this, be sure to tell us about it.

We’ve seen electroplating pens before and that’s really similar to this idea. Of course, you can also make your 3D prints conductive and plate them which is probably faster but isn’t really fully metal.

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Metal Plating Plastic Or Metal Parts

January 1, 2021 by 28 Comments

Like most of us, [Clem] wants to 3D print in metal. Metal 3D printers do exist, but they are generally way out of reach for most of us garage hackers. As an alternative, [Clem] uses a homebrew electroplating system to get prints with a metallic coating.

The setup is quite simple. Small glass jars to act as the plating tanks and the machine uses an Arduino controller along with a PCB to hold things like a relay to control the 24V used for electroplating. To keep everything tidy, [Clem] designed a 3D printed box that stores all the cables and chemicals when you aren’t using them. Since the parts might get hot, the plastic is PETG.

The trick is that parts need to be conductive in order to use electroplating — typically plastic isn’t conductive. [Clem] paints the plastic parts to grant them conductivity. Graphite paint didn’t give great results. However, an iron-based paint worked better but obscures detail on the print. In addition to galvanization (plating with zinc or steel) you can see copper plating of a nail at around the 12 minute mark, with a plastic plating demo a minute later. The machine can even plate gold using an expensive gold-bearing electrolyte. In the video comments, someone also mentioned that it would be interesting to try plating conductive filament without using the paint. [Clem] tried to remove rust from a big part, but the power supply wasn’t up to the task.

Copper plating is often used as a step to make a part conductive so you can then plate with another metal. In addition to copper sulfate, you can use copper acetate. Sometimes, getting metal into fine details can be tough and it is easier to use a pen to plate those areas directly.

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A New Method For Growing Watch Springs

November 2, 2019 by 26 Comments

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology (Empa) recently developed a new technique for growing watch springs to tiny specifications. As it turns out, the creation of watch springs is ripe with opportunity for new materials research.

The technique involves using photo-etching and electrochemical deposition into cold, aqueous solutions. Compared to drawing and winding Nivarox wires, this is a fairly unconventional method for manufacturing. For as long as watchmaking has been around, creating the balance springs has been one of the most difficult parts of the job. The wires must be drawn to a thickness in the hundredths of millimeters and wound and tempered to the exact hardness, ductility, and elasticity while compensating for environmental factors. Many substances change their properties during fabrication, so the Empa team decided to look to pure materials research as a way to find a means for fabricating balance springs that would remain stable.

They took silicon wafers (the same kind used for solar panels and computer chips), covered them in gold and a thin layer of light sensitive paint, and etched the shape of a spring into the wafer. The wafer was then dipped into a galvanic bath containing a salt solution from a metallic alloy — the spring acts as a cathode so that when an electric current passes through the bath, metal is deposited at the base of the spring. Once the spring is built up, it is dissolved from the mold and examined. After a bit of smoothing, the final spring is washed and sent to a lab for prototype production.

The electroplated springs are currently on display at the Laboratory for Mechanics of Materials and Nanostructures at the Empa campus in Thun, Switzerland. In the meantime, the first pilot tests are being wrapped up, and the team is beginning to work with Swiss watchmakers to see if their springs can hold up inside watch mechanisms.

[Thanks to Qes for the tip!]