Question: Calculating nickel in Electroless kit

[grandtouring]

I work at a restoration shop for vintage Italian sports cars and we are looking at the Caswell electroless nickel kit. Everything looks good in the kit except for the "unique calculating formula" that is used to balance the nickel solution. We have lots of odd shaped parts such as suspension steering arms that will need the nickel, and it would be a real hassle to have to measure the surface area of every part. It would be hard to get the calculations exactly correct every time and it seems that the cumulative calculation errors would eventually cause a bad plate and we would be left with no idea what our balance was.

I'm wondering if there is any way to test the balance of the solution? Is there a kit we could buy? Is this how Industrial plating shops balance their electroless nickel baths? We are very interested in the product but I want to make sure that we can use it efficiently before we buy it. Thanks,

-Nick

[lcaswell]

There is a titration technique to measure the amount of nickel in the bath, but it's extremely complex and requires some expensive chemistry equipment.

We've been selling this kit for over 10 years now, and no-one has ever needed to use this technique.

If you ballpark the surface area, you'll be close enough. You can only replenish the EN bath ten times before you need to make up a fresh batch anyway, so It's unlikely that you'll mess up the surface area badly enough to make a difference during these 10 replenishes.

Why are you thinking Electroless? From the parts you describe, a regular plating kit sounds better, and certainly much cheaper to operate.

[grandtouring]

The reason we need to use Electroless N. is because everything we do has to be perfectly original. Ferrari (Which is the majority of restorations we do) used electroless nickel on lots of different components through the 50's and 60's. Most of the cars we restore are for competition in shows and originality is the single most important aspect.

It looks like we are going to order the mini electroless kit to play around with, and then upgrade to a 15 gallon version if everything works out. So hopefully we can get an idea of how the calculation technique works for us. If we decide to go with the larger EN kit, I will give you a call and we can discuss the titration kit details. I just wanted to know if a titration kit was available. Thanks for the response Lance,

-Nick