Remove nickel plating from silver or brass jewelry: what chemical??

A. Try acidfied nickel sulphate solution, your object = anode, cathode= nickel or stainless steel. Hope it helps and good luck!

ASM Metals Handbook Vol. 5: "Surface Engineering"

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A. Hi, cousin Prakesh.

There are various chemicals available for stripping of nickel, including cyanide-based chemicals, but most of them have serious safety and environmental issues. Some threads here cover stripping of nickel in detail; please use the search term "nickel strip" and "remove nickel" in the search engine.

Despite the universal desire to formulate solutions in-house for economy, professionals usually use proprietary strippers and nickel plating solutions because they're better. Further, it is difficult to learn to be a good plater without a hands-on teacher, proven plating solutions, and the technical assistance that comes with them.

Still, if you want to make your own nickel plating solutions, you can use old-fashioned non-proprietary additives, and the ASM Metals Handbook Vol. 5 explains it in good detail.

Our "must-have" booklist includes reviews of many important plating handbooks, and I hope you find it useful. Good luck.

Regards,

A. While I have not tried this I would expect that the proprietary strippers available from most suppliers based on MNBS in 5% sulfuric acid for stripping nickel off brass, would also work on stripping nickel from silver.

A. Dear,
Proprietary chemicals are available at Bangalore at affordable price for removal of nickel from silver and brass.

Strippers are usually cheap products.

A. Atul, we have the need to strip nickel from brass. One of our main concerns was not damaging the brass. Some of the proprietary Nickel Strippers we had tried in the past were capable of causing quite bad surface etching to the brass. In the end, we used a small UK company to supply us with a reverse-electrolysis nickel stripper solution. I'm not sure what acids are used but we have a small 10 litre tank, use titanium baskets, hangers etc and a 30amp 6v power supply. It works very well for us and rarely causes any surface damage whatsoever to the brass. Once all of the nickel has gone, the current on the power supply drops to pretty much zero, then we know were done. It works at room temperature and we just agitate using air. The tank has a lid but even with the lid off, the fumes are not as bad as some other methods but should be used with fume extraction of some sort. It's unlikely you'll find a way to do this without generating any harmful fumes. If you're interested, I'll pass on the details. It's probably a fairly basic concoction.