Silver plating with silver nitrate

A. Hi cousin Nirmal. Goran offered a generic formula for this and its origin -- have you had a chance to make up a batch and try it? The application method, whether placing the parts in the solution, or brushing on the solution, or spraying it with the parts on a spin table will depend on what you are trying to coat. But the parts must be very clean and properly acid activated.

Sorry, but we can't post your video of a trade secret product, and ask people to post information about its secret composition -- that would be very close to crowd-sourcing industrial espionage :-)
You have to either buy a proprietary product, or start with published generic formulas and possibly improve upon them.

Good luck.

Regards,

A. For silver plating, use of cyanide is common and you can find silver cyanide in every shop, but if you want to get silver cyanide from nitrate, mix the 2x molar equivalent of sodium cyanide with silver nitrate to have Ag(CN)2 complex. Be careful from cyanide gas that may release from acidic solution and may kill your friend!

A. Good advice, Mr. Hosseyni. When an experiment has a great possibility of very dangerous or serious result, it can be foolhardy to try to read about how to do it. Hashemi's friend should have personal hands-on instruction, not free Internet advice, second-hand no less, before working with cyanide.

A. Not exactly. Although it is possible to apply a silver coating from a silver nitrate bath and a reducing agent (2-part silvering solution, Brashear process), to my knowledge it is not possible to do real silver electroplating from anything but silver cyanide or proprietary solutions.

A. Hi, Bryon. You don't need electricity. The inherent nobility of silver compared to copper provides the electrical energy. Please see our FAQ: "Silver Plating at Home". Good luck.

Regards,

A. Immersion silver plating bath-your object must be grease and oxide free! 15 gm silver nitrate/30 gm sodium thiosulphate ⇦ this on eBay or Amazon [affil links] /10 gm ammonium chloride/1 lit water. Dissolve nitrate in 50 gr water, add ammonium chloride dissolved in same amount of water, and then add thiosulphate dissolved in 900 ml water. Hope it helps and good luck!

A. If you wish to put an immersion silver deposit on suitable metals (which would probably be copper and brass), please see our FAQ on Silver Plating at Home for an explanation and a long list of consumer products that do this. This coating is very thin, but it is real silver and it does not require electricity. I do not know if these solutions are based on silver nitrate, sorry; but they are based on some salt of silver.

2-part silvering solutions are used to apply silver to glass and other non-conductive materials. The reducing agent can be formaldehyde (carcinogenic) or safer proprietaries.

Please consider securing a proprietary metallizing solution. It is dangerous to experiment with home-brew silvering solutions because of the possibility of creating and leaving behind remnants of explosive silver fulminates.

A. Phosphate based silver plating baths had been developed in the 19th century...
(Leonhard Elsner: 'Die galvanische Vergoldung und Versilberung sowohl Matt als glänzend'. 3. Auflage. Amelang, Leipzig 1856 (1.edition 1843)!
http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/display/bsb10304766_00001.html

Emanuel Schreiber: 'Vergoldungs- und Versilberungskunst durch Einlegen oder Anreiben'. Vogt, Weimar 1853
http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/en/fs1/object/display/bsb11112267_00005.html
Hope it helps and good luck!

Wow, an unexpected answer from Croatia, a nice country I really want to go to one of the islands...

Thanks! I just bought the chemical and will have a try when I have time, and let everybody know the result.

? Hi, was it successful?