Need help with Iron Plating Process

A. Hi Farzad. A quick intro to iron plating can be found in the Metal Finishing Guidebook. Your inquiry is very broad. You may want to start with a literature search on iron plating. After you have weighed the merits of fluoborate iron vs. iron sulphate vs. iron chloride, etc., you can look into the specific additives and operating conditions. In general, however, iron plating is not at all ductile.

You don't tell us what you are iron plating or why, or the chemical or thermal environment it will see, so it is difficult to make recommendations. If you need ductility, you might want to see if nickel plating or some other plating is a possibility, but we can't offer a good guess what might be a good substitute unless you tell us what you are trying to do and why. Thanks.

A. Hi, John. In the USA please try to do yourself the favor of buying a proprietary iron plating solution rather than trying to invent your own. Home-brew iron plating is very uncommon and most end users don't have the necessary organic analysis instrumentation to control additions -- instead they rely on the support of a process supplier. I personally don't know what additives they are using, but wouldn't be allowed to tell you if I did -- this stuff is still trade secret rather than generic info as far as I know. But best of luck.

Hi Mila. Iron rusts immediately so, although I could be wrong, I'd expect the salt spray resistance of iron plating to be virtually zero.

Regards,

A. Chance,
Low pH will in essence shut down plating. High pH will give an ugly product as well as nodular, burnt plating.
Correct the pH with an appropriate alkaline material. Check with the mfgr. to see what they recommend.
If you use caustic (sodium hydroxide) do it with a dilute solution with very slow additions and lots of agitation or you will precipitate some of the iron out and it will be slow coming back. If there is a buffer in the solution, the pH will rise to a point and then seem to stay there forever and then massively jump as it reacts with the buffer. This normally coincides with your frustration and adding a bit larger addition. Remember, pH is logarithmic. It takes about 10% as much to go from 3.9 to 4.0 as it took to go from 3.0 to 3.1.
Do not expect the pH to be the same a few min after the last addition as it will be several hours later.

A. Hi, Joffre.

Iron plating is an acid-based plating process, so it should be compatible with plating onto cast iron -- although I'm not personally familiar with iron-on-iron plating. But iron is a difficult plating process, probably not well suited to heavy deposits. A normal restoration process would probably be hard chrome plating, or heavy nickel plating, or possibly brazing and grinding. Are you sure that the plating need to be iron?

Regards,