DIY Brush Nickel Plating 1880’s Banjo Parts

I bought an 1880’s Dobson Victor “as-is” from Turtle Hill Banjo Company and it was in barely playable condition. As part of the restoration, I needed to remove a bunch of corrosion on both the tension hoop and the rim. Since the corrosion went through the nickel plating, I decided to remove as much as possible mechanically (fine sand / buff) but this removed some of the surrounding nickel plating also. Although, I could have polished the tension hoop completely and sent it out for nickel plating this was not possible for the spun-over rim since it has a wood core. I did some research and decided to try some brush nickel plating. There isn’t a lot of info out there to do this on the cheap outside of a few YouTube videos (this one was the most helpful). Many of the DIY nickel plating videos showed making the plating fluid which seemed a bit daunting at the time and a pretty long process for something that I wasn’t sure was going to work anyway. I researched some of the commercial plating kits but they are pretty expensive. I decided to piece together my own kit and was able to get everything from Amazon for pretty cheap (Under $100 total). This is also applicable to anything else that you might want to brush nickel plate like vintage guitar, mandolin, or other instrument parts.

Here are some images of the results. The first image shows the right side being plated and the left not yet done. The tension hoop shows the final result – I kept the dings and damage but added the new nickel plating where it was corroded.

My method for doing this is to make a brush “wand” by wrapping about 4 of the gauze pads around the end of the nickel anode bar then securing it with a rubber band. The bar can be insulated with electrical tape or a piece of heat-shrink tubing if the electricity concerns you. I then connected the NEGATIVE lead to the item to be plated and the POSITIVE lead to the nickel anode. I then set the power supply to 12V @ 2A (max) [lower is probably ok but this worked for me]. I then dipped the end of the brush into the nickel plating solution that I had poured into a 1oz medicine cup and started rubbing the brush on the surface. Instructions said to keep the brush moving or else you may get black spotting – I didn’t see this happen but I did keep it moving. It took about 20 seconds per square inch to put on plating. For this application, I did one plating then polished and did another one on top of it. It’s very important that the surface be completely clean and free of oil/grease. I used dishwashing liquid and Windex for this.

Since this is an 1880s banjo, I only plated things that needed protection or were corroded since I didn’t want to erase the history of the instrument.

This worked so well that I made some of the plating solution myself (since it’s pretty expensive at $30 for 8 ounces) from Distilled Vinegar and Nickel sheet according to the instructions here. It took about 2 ounces of the solution to plate the tension hoop and part of the rim.