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Does anyone here do small scale zinc plating at home?  I just bought a kit from Caswell Plating but I curious to know some more info as to what type of power supply/rectifier I might need and some other tips/tricks. 

Let us know how it goes. I saw that for sale and was wondering about it.

I have a buddy that does some small bits (mostly nuts and bolts sized stuff) for British cars.  Neat process.  If I recall correctly it is a pretty low amperage power adapter, but I can reach out to him and see if he has any words of wisdom.

Please post after you have used it- would love to know how it works!

Well I finally got a chance to test out the plating kit that I bought, I picked up a lab power supply off Ebay for $40 which lets me vary the amperage going to the part.  I am excited to say the least at how things are coming out, it takes a little work to prep the parts, grease is not your friend.  I do wish I still had my old sandblast cabinet, but carb cleaner and muriatic acid are doing a fine job so far.

I have done a few parts so far, I had just cleaned up my coin box holder for my V-90 a while back, so I gave that a run through and it came out great.  My primary goal is to start plating the carburetors that I make lamps out of, so the last set of pics is the base that I did an hour ago.

I went with the Copy Cad kit from Caswell: http://www.caswellplating.com/electroplating-anodizing/zinc-plating-kits.html

And a couple more of the carburetor base before and after

Wow!

At first glance I thought you were starting a meth lab.  :biggrin: That thing works great. What an amazing difference. Good Job!

Great results Tom!  Way to go!

Hm, now that I think about it the neighbors might get suspicious, maybe I need to keep the garage door shut!  Between that setup, the respirator, goggles and gloves it looks like an episode of Breaking Bad

Haha good idea.

great job

Great for small jobs! I might have to look into that.
Does it give any kind of instruction for controlling the applied thickness?

It comes with a big manual with tons of instructions, the standard is 20 mins for steel, 30 mins for cast iron for a 0.001 thickness.  Also lots of calculations you can do if you know surface area etc.

Here's the full before and after of the carburetor, I had tried to do it all at once but my power supply wasn't having any of it and it didn't coat.  These breakdown into three parts and doing them that way worked out great. 

Next up I have some old parts slug rejectors (the small arcade game size) I'm going to see how some of those parts plate up.

Cool old single-barrel Stromberg side-draft.  I had one of those on my Spitfire (different model - much smaller) that I replaced with twin SUs. 

Funny you should mention this. I actually had a cop sit in his car and keep an eye on me once when I was using some muriatic acid to clean some parts. Thinking one of the neighbors called him when they saw me outside with gloves, goggles and a face shield putting things into a bucket with a little bit of smoke coming off of it.

Very cool gizmo!
Nice job on those parts.

What did you use for a heater in your bucket?