Mark, I've been studying some basis of electricity in the past few days, and one thing you said I can't really understand: you say I will need certain voltage for certain plating processes but, according to what the Caswell manual says about controlling the current with bulbs or a rheostat (I will be building one using some dozens of meters of copper wire with the help of an electrician), the voltage is not really mentioned. And I've been thinking over this, finding that if I pick up a battery and fit a bulb into the circuit, after the bulb there will be no potential difference, and that's where the tank would be fit in the electroplating process. Now, the "tank" has virtually no resistance, thus the potential difference at its ends will be anyway close to zero.
We made a few counts, considering a 4V battery built by making bridges between the 2V elements 1,3,5 and 2,4,6 of a 12V car battery. Thus 1,3,5 in parallel giving together 2V, + other 2V of elements 2,4,6 = 4V:
if I want to have 10 amps going around I will have to use 56 meters of a 2,5 square millimeters copper wire (the one used in 16 A plugs). I'll roll it around some sort of wooden rack so that it'll stay fresh, not changing the resistance, which grows the hotter the metal gets, screwing up the counts which consider the resistivity of copper room-temperature (0.018 Ohm x mmq). Then I'll fit a few clamps at different lenghts on the wire, e.g. at 28 meters for 20 amps, etc.
Hope I'm not being delirious
Please let me know what you think of my reasoning.
Thanks again