Thread: Kitchen chemistry- copper plating

I ran across a neat little experiment on a chemistry blog: Home Chemistry: Penny chemistry - Verdigris and copper plating
and decided to give it a shot on a razor. Initially I was going to spend a lot of time cleaning and sanding, after an hour of hand sanding I decided it's clean enough (it wasn't) and proceeded with the experiment. First you need vinegar, I used distilled white, salt (NaCl), pennies, and your steel to be plated.

I put about a cup of vinegar in a glass and dumped in about 50 pennies. I picked a lot of dull oxidized pennies thinking the copper oxide would go into solution better than just copper. Let these sit in the vinegar for 5-10 minutes. After that time fish them out with an old spoon, and prep your metal to be plated. I suggest sanding the metal perfectly clean of tarnish/oxidation, and then using acetone or isopropyl alcohol to remove any grease/oil/contaminants from the metal. I used some aluminum rod I had laying around to fashion a holder:


After about two hours I ended up with this:


You can see in places where the plating is not even, I think this is because of my lackadaisical approach to prepping the steel. I ended up dumping 5 or so extra pennies in with the steel after about an hour, hoping to get some more copper into solution and push the equilibrium towards the plating-side. Also, don't let the metal touch the sides of the glass, or the pennies, because it will prevent that area from being plated. After all was said and done I rinsed with water, dried it off, rubbed extra copper off, and then put a coat of RenWax on to prevent oxidation (although that might look neat). Just thought I would share my experiment. I'm going to finish cleaning up the blade and put it back into it's scales. So we will see how durable it is.

edit: Some more thoughts, I coated everything I didn't want plated/oxidized in RenWax because I was afraid of vapors hitting the bare metal. I did end up with a little more oxidation above the vinegar line than I started with, but I think it should clean up.