Fun with Chemistry (anti-corrosion)

[graham-xrf]

When I was little, chemistry could be done at school, but a real home chemistry set was simply not affordable. I did build a (dangerous!) rocket from old bicycle pump, fueled by zinc dust, and sulphur nefariously acquired via a school friend, ignited from a flashlight bulb filament where we had broken away the glass. Then when a bit older, and with maybe slightly more money, I discovered model airplane engines, motorcycles, girls, and interests moved on. Somehow, I never did get back to the chemistry set.

Add to this, what passed for a "chemistry set" became a dumbed-down thing with truly infantile "experiments" where the most exciting thing that could happen was see some litmus paper encounter a drop of vinegar!

Now - even though banished into the pokey little cellar for "chemistry stuff", I get to play again. I got the jar of distilled spirit vinegar from Sainsbury's, about 1/3 teaspoon of salt, some nickel sheet from eBay, and with an old Farnell bench power supply, I turned it into that beautiful green liquid. It took about 3 hours.



There is something very pure and pretty about the color of metal ions in solution. The calculation there involves the electron charge, the Faraday constant, Avagadro's number and stuff like that - ignore!

Check out the steel rod. That is the drive counter-shaft from a South Bend 9C. You can tell that I could not resist the temptation to dunk the end of the counter-shaft into the jar. Not such a good move, because it ends up top heavy, and threatened to tip everything over.
A very basic mistake ignoring Archimedes 101 required a mad scene with the plastic squeeze pipette to remove some nickel solution, again to head off a yuk spillage!

About 5 minutes or so, running about 0.75A, and the end of the shaft will never rust again.
Duh! Yes - I get it that plating one end is half a job. I have to figure out a much better plating bath. "Pot de confiture" is clearly not up to the task!



The steel rod was already cleaned up shiny, but I think the place where the nickel plating begins just about shows up OK in the picture. It was only 5 minutes worth anyway, but it looks enough to say goodbye to the rust.

The shaft had suffered some scoring from being run without oil. I stoned the tops off the ridges, and polished it up with abrasive papers. I think it will ride on oil OK. The grooves area is small compared to un-scored shaft in the journals. Given the taper pin through it, I did not want to make a new slightly larger diameter version, ream the journals, and the drive wheel. Of course, the Catch-22 is that the shaft comes from the same lathe that would be needed to make another shaft.

While the underneath drive is apart, it gets the clean-up. It came with the cone pulley "reversed", and the yoke mounted on a piece of 2 x 4 fixed to the floor. I trashed all that, and set about mounting on the underside of the bench steel plate, the way it should be.

Some of the clean-up seen here (I know HM folk like pictures). It was in a real mess when I got it. I tried the cream white alkyd paint, but things did not go well, and some parts failed to harden. At one stage, it was a mix of sanded paint, primer, masking tape and a piece of HDPE plastic farm water pipe just the right size through the journals




Except for some exposed metal bits getting the homebrewed DIY nickel treatment, we have it now OK to go together. Try and ignore the small tailstock wheel. It belongs to the 9A, and is only there because it was the dry run for the paint colour.



The nickel seems to be somewhat harder than the steel under it. Perhaps silly, but it makes me think that if one kept the current on for long enough, the scoring grooves could end up "filled with nickel", and in effect "repaired". I also think such is not really necessary. I am convinced that if put back, given new wicks and oil, it will be just fine.

A bit of a ramble, and it got well off even the off-topic topic - sorry about that!

 

[Aukai]

Interesting

 

[westerner]

In my first year of college, I took a class called Chem/Physics. One semester Chemistry, and one semester Physics. I enjoyed the Physics half, and was completely lost on the other. My buddies were the opposite.

The way any mind is wired will help to define that life, and cannot be compared to any other wiring.

I am glad to hear you have found a re-connection to your foundations.

 

[vtcnc]

Nice work! Nickel is definitely harder than the steel. At the low amperage you are running, you won't be able to fill in any gouges, or imperfections. In my plant, we run a nickel plating line on cast iron and mild steel. Our "lunch time specials" (leave 'em in the plating tank over the 1/2 hour lunch break @900A) will put a nice heavy nickel plate on - you can still see the imperfections.

I'm almost finished my lathe bench. When I start rebuilding my Atlas 10, I'm going to plate some of the castings. I love the look of the bright finish.

 

[7milesup]

In my first year of college, I took a class called Chem/Physics. One semester Chemistry, and one semester Physics. I enjoyed the Physics half, and was completely lost on the other. My buddies were the opposite.

The way any mind is wired will help to define that life, and cannot be compared to any other wiring.

I am glad to hear you have found a re-connection to your foundations.

I was the same way. Enjoyed physics but chemistry...ugghhh.

 

[7milesup]

When I was little, chemistry could be done at school, but a real home chemistry set was simply not affordable. I did build a (dangerous!) rocket from old bicycle pump, fueled by zinc dust, and sulphur nefariously acquired via a school friend, ignited from a flashlight bulb filament where we had broken away the glass. Then when a bit older, and with maybe slightly more money, I discovered model airplane engines, motorcycles, girls, and interests moved on. Somehow, I never did get back to the chemistry set.

Add to this, what passed for a "chemistry set" became a dumbed-down thing with truly infantile "experiments" where the most exciting thing that could happen was see some litmus paper encounter a drop of vinegar!

Now - even though banished into the pokey little cellar for "chemistry stuff", I get to play again. I got the jar of distilled spirit vinegar from Sainsbury's, about 1/3 teaspoon of salt, some nickel sheet from eBay, and with an old Farnell bench power supply, I turned it into that beautiful green liquid. It took about 3 hours.

View attachment 333060

There is something very pure and pretty about the color of metal ions in solution. The calculation there involves the electron charge, the Faraday constant, Avagadro's number and stuff like that - ignore!

Check out the steel rod. That is the drive counter-shaft from a South Bend 9C. You can tell that I could not resist the temptation to dunk the end of the counter-shaft into the jar. Not such a good move, because it ends up top heavy, and threatened to tip everything over.
A very basic mistake ignoring Archimedes 101 required a mad scene with the plastic squeeze pipette to remove some nickel solution, again to head off a yuk spillage!

About 5 minutes or so, running about 0.75A, and the end of the shaft will never rust again.
Duh! Yes - I get it that plating one end is half a job. I have to figure out a much better plating bath. "Pot de confiture" is clearly not up to the task!

View attachment 333061

The steel rod was already cleaned up shiny, but I think the place where the nickel plating begins just about shows up OK in the picture. It was only 5 minutes worth anyway, but it looks enough to say goodbye to the rust.

The shaft had suffered some scoring from being run without oil. I stoned the tops off the ridges, and polished it up with abrasive papers. I think it will ride on oil OK. The grooves area is small compared to un-scored shaft in the journals. Given the taper pin through it, I did not want to make a new slightly larger diameter version, ream the journals, and the drive wheel. Of course, the Catch-22 is that the shaft comes from the same lathe that would be needed to make another shaft.

While the underneath drive is apart, it gets the clean-up. It came with the cone pulley "reversed", and the yoke mounted on a piece of 2 x 4 fixed to the floor. I trashed all that, and set about mounting on the underside of the bench steel plate, the way it should be.

Some of the clean-up seen here (I know HM folk like pictures). It was in a real mess when I got it. I tried the cream white alkyd paint, but things did not go well, and some parts failed to harden. At one stage, it was a mix of sanded paint, primer, masking tape and a piece of HDPE plastic farm water pipe just the right size through the journals


View attachment 333064

Except for some exposed metal bits getting the homebrewed DIY nickel treatment, we have it now OK to go together. Try and ignore the small tailstock wheel. It belongs to the 9A, and is only there because it was the dry run for the paint colour.

View attachment 333063

The nickel seems to be somewhat harder than the steel under it. Perhaps silly, but it makes me think that if one kept the current on for long enough, the scoring grooves could end up "filled with nickel", and in effect "repaired". I also think such is not really necessary. I am convinced that if put back, given new wicks and oil, it will be just fine.

A bit of a ramble, and it got well off even the off-topic topic - sorry about that!

Love that color and very interesting chemistry lesson!

 

[RJSakowski]

I took both physics and chemistry....majored in both. I enjoyed chemistry but really understood physics.

Nickel is more electro-negative than iron so any break in a nickel plate will be open to corrosion.

 

[RJSakowski]

I got a Gilbert Chemistry set for Christmas when I was around 12 years old. One of the first things that UI did was to augment the chemicals supplied with my own purchases from the drugstore. I too was interested in rocketry. To that end, I was intent on making a solid fueled rocket, the fuel bein a mixture of zinc filings and sulfur melted and cast into a rocket engine.

I collected a bunch of zinc and was melting it down...using my parents propane fired hot water heater. As it turned out some of the zinc plugged the orifices neatest the pilot light which caused delayed ignition. One night the water heater fired up with a bang, shaking the house and my parents whose bedroom was directly over the water heater. I heard about it the next morning and was still hearing about it 60 years later. As it happens, zinc doesn't file well so I never did make that rocket engine.

Another interesting experiment was heating paraffin and sulfur. The product is hydrogen sulfide gas. Not the experiment to perform in your bedroom. Ask me how I know.

Sulfuric acid is a starting point for many chemical products. I decided that I needed some so I set up a small reactor to burn sulfer to make sulfer dioxide which was then trapped in water to create sulfurous acid. Sulfurous acid oxidizes to sulfuric acid but it does so painfully slowly. The resulting acid was also fairly weak.

I won't go into the dynamite/blasting caps and thoughts about making nitroglycerine. Only to say it would probably result in some hard time nowadays.

But hey, I did become a professional chemist.

 

[graham-xrf]

Hee Hee - thanks all.
For me it was a mix of indulging in a little nostalgia, mixed up together with doing something for the South Bend Lathe. For special reasons, I have been "shielding" since March, hiding out from the pestilence here in the countryside. Maybe getting a bit cabin-feverish? I don't know, but here I am getting up to the stuff of schooldays.

For those who would try this .. it's easy. Good stuff on YouTube about it, but to have it happen right, there are some little details.
1. First is, do not try this with vinegar that already had the pickled onions in it at any stage (try not to laugh)!
The foodstuff adds sugars, and "preservative", and "stabilizer" etc. It became a mess. Get the purest distilled vinegar you can. Mine was clear distilled malt vinegar. You can get the sharper distilled "spirit vinegar" also, and it will be fine.

2. The metal has to be very clean, grease free, not even handled to leave fingerprints. Use disposable gloves, which are a must when dealing with chemicals anyway. The reason the bottle of diluted battery acid is there was to wipe over the end of the steel shaft with it, followed by a squirt of distilled water, as a final clean before starting to plate. Swimming pool type HCL (hydrochloric acid) will also work. No acid, but just clean and wash away all detergents, and a final wipe over with alcohol is probably enough. Even some brake cleaner will do.

3. I used 1mm thick (that's about 0.040") strips of nickel about 10mm wide, cut from eBay nickel sheet using ordinary tin snip sheet metal cutters.
Hang a strip over each side of the jar, and connect up. You will start making green solution. Stir in a little salt, less than half a teaspoon's worth. The conductivity rocks up. 50mA becomes 600mA in seconds. One electrode streams tiny bubbles. That is the negative end. That is the one replaced by the item to be plated.

4. The green solution will keep getting greener in use, until it saturates. I am not sure what happens beyond that point. Unless you foul up the solution, it can keep working indefinitely.

5. As it gets going, you need less voltage. This might happen anyway as you overload a tiny ex-phone charger. I ended up with it set to about 4V. The current depends on the area of what you dunk in there, and the separation to the donating electrode, and the temperature, and how green is the liquid, and how much salt. Don't overdo the salt. You end up doing some other chemistry involving chlorine. You want to see bubbles only on the part being plated

About kid's chemistry
I don't say we should allow school kids to be put in danger by needlessly exposing them to toxic chemicals. That is not the same thing as deciding all "chemicals" should be removed from their lives. Of course we should "expose them" to chemicals in the way of teaching them how to deal with them. The same goes for energy - electricity, and generally all the stuff that makes space launches possible.

Re the politically incorrect school kid's chemistry book. Driven out by a partly broken safety culture and financially motivated lawsuit cheap shots, the basis of David Hahn's demise is here attached. (see "Radioactive Boy Scout"). The better image quality scanned pdfs version is 29MB - so it has to be this copy. Hahn was a bit of a screw-up, and he died at 39. The chemistry book attached was the one that allegedly "led him astray".

Here we are talking of exactly the growing up experiences of many American kids through 1940's to about early1970's. I guess even the late Richard Feynman would have had the same scene at Far Rockaway when he was a teenager. The Feynman household was subjected to all kinds of explosions, stinks, and damage because of his "experiments", and we know he put together his own version of "chemistry set".

 

[graham-xrf]

Nice work! Nickel is definitely harder than the steel. At the low amperage you are running, you won't be able to fill in any gouges, or imperfections. In my plant, we run a nickel plating line on cast iron and mild steel. Our "lunch time specials" (leave 'em in the plating tank over the 1/2 hour lunch break @900A) will put a nice heavy nickel plate on - you can still see the imperfections.

I'm almost finished my lathe bench. When I start rebuilding my Atlas 10, I'm going to plate some of the castings. I love the look of the bright finish.

I was thinking a Watts-type bath using Nickel Sulfate and Boric Acid could be something to try, perhaps with a few more ingredients. There are lots of nickel salts plating solutions, and various plating properties one can end up with. I can manage about 50A at 5V, but in our case, we can substitute time for current. The ions will plate anyway. That calculation showed me that 58.69 grams of nickel needs 2 x the number of electrons it takes to liberate 1mol worth. I figured that in 2 hours, the 7200 second worth at 0.5A would deposit 1.095grams. Getting to efficiency, and without cooking it up to 50C, we can get about 50% of that. Half a gram is not much, but is enough to fill some grooves.

A thick plating surface will pretty much follow the profile of the surface it started on. You could have a plating thickness many times the size of the imperfection, and still see the imperfection replicated on the top. I think a "filling repair" would be to plate on enough to fill the groove, then cut back to the original dimension. In my case, the oil film should be thicker than the grooves depths, so this time, the value in the plating is about corrosion protection.

Yes indeed on the castings. I love that!
I wonder if one can get the plating to work through wet cotton wool swab, with solution, like you can do with gold plating? That way one could "go over" the machine surfaces exposed to rust, instead of having to dunk the whole thing in plating solution.