Okay, the Jewel Master was
designed for plating jewelry items so we're gonna
demonstrate here we've got three different types of items we've
got a... this is made out of a jewelers brass. This I presume is some kind of
sovereign this a... PMC item that was
formed and then polished with a serpentine chain
and what I did to prepare these was I wash them all with warm soapy water
then dried them so that we didn't get water spots on them. Now a large item like this
pendant, could be done using the common lead.
Where we don't rack the part we just plug into the common port
and we can go through the entire process
and plate it one item at a time. What i'm going to do to plate these parts
is I'm going to rack them.
This is our sample rack there's a lot of different racks people can make depending on what kinda work your doing.
So i'm going to hang the large pendant there,
the brass pendant.
I'm going to hang the silver pendant there.
And i guess what i'll do is hang the precious metal pendant here,
no... we'll go up to this wire.
And then for chain, what we need to do is, it's important,
We have a specific chain rack that keeps the chain nice
and tight. I think what i'm going to do is i'm just gonna
try looping the chain around so we have a lot of points of contact, in hanging
the emblems over here. So you can see
the chain is draped and uh..
hopefully that will provide enough contact that, that'll work.
Actually we'll know when we go through the process.
Okay now the parts have been uh.. of course the parts have been prepared by
the person that made the jewelry items and they've been washed with
warm soapy water and they've been hung on the rack.
So now we're going to go through the three-step process for the Jewel Master:
and the first step is an Electoral Cleaning, it's a Alkaline Electoral Clean
and you can see that when the part hangs onto the gold plated bus bar
the electrical current is provided to the pieces and we get some
light bubbling at the surface. What that does is that
light bubbling cleans off anything that might be residual anything that could
affect the plating.
We'll do that for probably 20 to 30 seconds.
We'll take the parts out,
go through this, just freshwater rinse
to remove the electro cleaner.
Then we'll go into the activator.
The activator is a solution designed to make the service chemically active so that
the gold solution will adhere to it.
With this particular kit you can plate
items was an area up to about 12 square inches.
So there's a lot of pieces that you can hang on the rack.
Again you can see we get a light bubbling or gasing at the surface.
Rinse off the activator.
Now we are going to go into a distilled water rinse since we don't want to
drag any rinse water or previous solutions into our gold solution.
We wanna make sure it's maintained.
You'll notice a voltage I've got set at about 3.8 uh..
3.9 and that's just guessing. I want to end up with the voltage of about 2.7 volts
so we're at 2.54 and so what i'll do is reach over turn the voltage up
to about 2.7.
Now we're at about 2.75, that's good.
And the temperature of the solution is a 100 degrees.
Now what I'm gonna do is a... in about just under three minutes,
this would achieve a plating thickness of a half a micron which is a jewelry grade thickness.
And I'm watching the clock. And so what we're going to do is after about half of that time,
or a minute and a half,
I'm gonna take the parts out of the solution and rotate it.
So that we can have that the electrical current actually comes from the anode here.
So we want to be able to expose both sides of the part, to the anode equally.
there's about a minute and fifteen seconds.
Okay, so it's been about a minute and a half, so what I'm gonna do is
take the parts out.
You can see it looks like everything plated good.
I want to increase in thickness, so I'm gonna turn the rack around,
and hang in there. And we'll leave it in there for another
minute-and-a-half, two minutes something like that so i get a good heavy coat.
You can plate twice as long and get twice the thickness.
If i were going to plate that with a full micron of gold,
what i would probably do is take it out after the three minutes and rinse it.
Just to make sure the surface is nice and clean of any deposits.. any plating deposits that aren't gold.
Okay there's been another minute and a half.
So we'll pull the parts out,
we'll go back into our gold solution rinse.
Now, we hold them into the light, to where we look them over,
make sure everything is covered good, which i'm certain it did.
We'll take them off, give them a good rinse,
take them off one at a time, and dry them with a very soft cloth.
Just to avoid having water spots get on them. There's the silver piece,
Here's the jewelers brass part.
You can see everything plated down into the a.. looks like this artist put a..
some kind of a bezel to hold a stone.
That's going to be a nice looking pendant.
It's important to note that the quality of the finish,
after it's gold plated, will be exactly like the quality of the finish prior to gold plating.
It won't get rid of any scratches, any dull spots; all that has to be done with the pre-finishing.
A chain is something that can be a..
tricky to do. We have a specially designed
chain rack, that holds the chain
tight and insures a conductivity from link to link.
However, this fine serpentine chain usually,
conducts fairly well and plates well, as long as you make contact with
it in several areas. So here's the precious metal clay part
and it turned out really nice. Very pretty.
The artist signature on the back.
And the chain, we'll just let them thoroughly dry and then pack them up for shipment.