Speaker 1 (00:05):

Hey guys. Welcome back to the Engineered Angler. A couple of weeks ago I did a full tutorial on how to silver plate lures using this duplex gun. This gun shoots two chemicals simultaneously out of this one little nozzle. Now this is a gun I made, but you can purchase a gun like this from the folks who supply the chemicals, but this little gun is what makes silver plating lures really economical. And in that full tutorial video I silver plated 10 top water lures. And since then I've actually painted them in colors that I really like, including this gold and copper one, which really it turned out to be my favorite color scheme on this thing, but you can really see the depth of the paint job because of that reflective surface underneath. Now since then I've been experimenting with another technique that doesn't use that spray gun.

(00:54):

It actually uses a technique where you dip the lure into the two solutions and allow those chemicals to react around the lure. And the results were really good and I just did it on some very small lures and I've since painted those lures too. And there's just something about fishing with little micro lures that's just a lot of fun. So in this video I'm going to go ahead and show you the technique of dipping to silver plate, which I think is going to be a technique that is going to work really well for kind of small lures, but it'll work for larger lures, but it won't be as cost effective. And we'll get into the cough difference from spraying it on, which I covered in the last video. And in that video we calculated that the cost per lure was about 75 cents, but what I didn't mention there was that with the kit, the size kit that I recommended, you can actually get about 400 lures done.

(01:46):

So let's get to this and see what we come up with. Now I've been experimenting a little bit over here on how small a container I could use. I think you can see the silver plating on the inside of that and with the diluted chemicals, and I'm checking to see if I can dilute them even further to save chemicals and still get a good reaction. Now the supplier of the chemicals angel gilding recommends that you use 10 milliliters of the concentrated chemical with every thousand milliliters of distilled water, and that's what this is. Hopefully you can see that distilled water, and this might look a little complicated and sort of scientific, but it's pretty simple stuff. If you can follow a recipe, you can do this. And if you haven't seen the Silvering process at all, you really need to watch the tutorial I did a couple of weeks ago.

(02:31):

I'll put the link here and I'll put the link in the description as well. Now being able to do it this way, dipping whatever it is you're trying to silver plate into just a little container with the chemicals in it really simplifies the process in that you don't need a big compressor, you don't need that specialty spray gun and you don't need to worry about a respirator because since you're not misting out this stuff, you don't have to worry about those little atomized particles that you might inhale, which would definitely irritate your lungs. It's a cleaner process. You need fewer things to do it, and it's almost as quick to do and just as magical looking when you do it. The two chemicals are the silver solution, which is an actual concentrate of a silver solution. And then you have the reducer, which actually causes the reaction and causes the silver to drop out a solution and adhere onto the surface of whatever it is you're trying to silver plate.

(03:24):

The recommended amount to put into a thousand milliliters is 10 milliliters of the concentrate. I've only got a hundred milliliters here, so the recommended amount for this would be one milliliter. I want to try it with about half the concentration, so I'm going to use 0.5 millimeters. So I've got this one milliliter syringe and I've got it filled halfway and we'll just put it into our distilled water and I'll pour that into a bottle. And you can buy all these containers and bottles and measuring cylinders really inexpensively. I'll put a link in the description where I've gotten them and I'm going to do the same thing for the other chemical, the reducer, and I'm going to use a syringe that I set aside for using for that chemical because you don't want to contaminate your chemicals one with the other, and I'll pour that off into a bottle of its own.

(04:12):

And what I intend to actually silver plate is this little square bill blank. I ordered 10 of them. Getting someone else's blanks is really the cheapest and easiest way to do all this experimentation. Now the next step is to clear coat this because anything that you want, a silver plate has to have a absolutely glossy finish on it. They're just a little bit hazy. They don't really reflect light very well, so they wouldn't create a good base for a good reflective surface like silver. So what I've done here is to mix this two part resin clear coat that you can get from angel gilding. It's essentially an automotive clear coat and it creates a super hard and very thin glossy finish. I'm going to use my airbrush to spray that clear coat. Now you can use whatever clear coat you're really comfortable with. If you get a super high gloss finish with your clear coat, certainly use it. Just make sure that it's well set before you go to silver plated

(05:18):

And you can pretty much see how quickly it actually becomes very transparent because that clear coat fills in all those little micro scratches. Now I can just let this flash off for about three minutes and give it another clear coat just to be sure it's got a nice shine on it. And I'll go ahead and put a gloss coat on all 10 of these. And when they're good and dry, we'll go ahead and start silver plating. Alright, so while those set, I'm going to go ahead and experiment a little bit to see if my weaker solution, the cheaper solution is going to actually work. I've got two chemicals diluted to the recommended amount, which is 10 milliliters per liter and I've got mine diluted to five milliliters per liter. And I'm going to use these spoons because they're already really glossy. So I'm going to use a tiny little cup as my silver plating sort of receptacle.

(06:16):

And since it already has the little millimeter marks on there, I can go ahead and put a mark on the 20 and the 10, I'll take it up to the 10 milliliter mark with the silver solution and the second half will be with the reducer. So before I can actually dip the spoon into the solution to get it silver plated, I've got to prepare the surface so the silver solution will actually adhere to it. And it's really a simple process. The idea is to have the fluids cover the surface really evenly without beating at all. So what I do first is just take a mild soap and clean it down really good. And then I'll just rinse it off with tap water and follow up with some distilled water. And you see the results we get. You see how the spoon is absolutely beat it up and in no way we'll actually lay down a really smooth and thin coat.

(07:05):

That's what we got to fix first. First we spray it with a surfactant. This is just a simple surfactant. Again, you can get this stuff from angel gilding and now I'm going to spray it with the tin activator. This is also from Angel gilding and it's also a concentrated solution that you just mix with water. And this is what really prepares the surface for the silver to it here. So I'm going to mist it and you can see how nice and evenly that liquid is just laying on there. And we'll just leave it on there for like 20 or 30 seconds. I think we can move on now. So I'm going to go ahead and rinse it off with distilled water and you can see how different it acts now, no beating at all. So I'm going to stick it in there and then take the level up to 20 milliliters and I'm just going to stir it a little bit and you can see it quickly start to change colors.

(08:04):

The reactions starting to happen and what you want to do is not wait too long so you don't end up with a really kind of a dark black pearl kind of a color. You can see how quickly and how perfectly that creates a mirror surface. And that is just so fun to watch. I love to see that happen. It's just magical every time. And you can see the original transparent part spoon and I think you can see the reflection of the camera and the rest of the shop in the back and the waist. This stuff cannot be used again. I know somebody online asked me how many times you could use it and the answer is once it's reacted, you can't dip anything else in there and get anything good out of it anyway. And I just pour it into my waste bucket and if I'm going to use this again, I'll go ahead and rinse it out and wipe it down to get any residue out of it.

(09:00):

Alright, so let's try doing it with the lower concentration solutions that I mixed. See if it works because doing the dipping method as opposed to spraying uses more material. So you really have to be strategic about the size and shape of the container you're using so that you can keep the volume of the material you use down as much as you can. And at the very end we'll do a quick calculation and figure out what the difference in cost is going to be between this and spraying. Alright, I've already got the spoon prepared and I've got the first chemical in there, which is the silver solution, and we'll just dip the spoon in and bring the solution up to the 20 milliliter mark just so we have half and half. Okay, and let's see if this works. It may or may not. It's certainly going to be a little slower I would think, but it's starting to turn already.

(09:57):

All right, it looks like it worked and this is the one I just did. It looks great. And here's the one we did a little bit ago and it looks just as good, which is great. We just cut our chemical consumption in half, so that's fantastic. I'm going to throw this away and it's getting a little bit late, so I'm going to go down to Lake and I'm going to show you some monster Golden Lake Shiners. Hopefully I'll catch one. They're the biggest ones I've ever seen. I actually caught a fourteener a few days ago. Hopefully we'll catch something big enough to impress you first. I'm going to chum 'em up with some fish food and they're not very active today. I might get struck out and with a little bread ball pinched onto that little hook, we'll go ahead and cast it out there where the activity is. Here we go. Oh, that guy took it hard. It might be a blue gill. Yeah, it's a big blue gill bummer. Yeah, big blue gill. Let's get him off so we can catch something that I want to catch, but that's a pretty nice one that's eating size. If you eat them, wow, the wind is just absolutely howling.

Speaker 2 (11:21):

There we go. Oh yeah, I think that's a shiner.

Speaker 1 (11:27):

There we go. Oh yeah, that's a good one too. It's not even that big. I'm telling you, I caught much bigger ones than this. So look at that. That's a golden lake shiner. And I would say this is a medium to large, but he shits like a big one. Dang.

(11:58):

All right, it's the next morning. We're set up to silver plate. We've got one more little step I want to do and this will answer a question I had from a viewer and that is, can you mask off the bib on the lure so it doesn't get the silver plate on it? Now I personally like my bibs silver plated. I think it looks cool, it adds just a little more flash in the water. But yeah, you absolutely can mask it off if you're really good at masking with tape, you can actually do it with tape. You just have to have some good quality tape so it holds on at least through the process. But you can also use a liquid mask, and this is just a liquid latex. You can put it on with a small brush, but be sure you don't want that small brush.

(12:37):

It does ruin the brush after you use it. And this is what it looks like after you've got it on there. It's kind of a pale blue and the idea is it acts like masking tape and you put it on, it's easy to get it really close to the edges where you want it. And then when you're done painting and everything, you just rub it off. It has a consistency of a rubber cement and it just rolls right off. Now I'm going to mask probably half of them and I'll just want to do one on camera so you can see how it flows. It's pretty simple, you just sort of goober it on there. And as you approach the line that you want nice and neat, you slow down a little bit, fill in down there and just make sure you get the edges. And this stuff drives so quick that you really do have to move kind of fast, and that's what it ends up looking like.

(13:22):

I'm going to do a couple more off camera. We'll get started putting Chrome on these guys and it's been about five minutes and you can see it goes sort of clear or translucent when you're ready to paint. Alright, I think we're ready to get started. Silver plating. Lemme show you the actual container I decided to use. There's nothing special about this. It actually is a little bottle and I cut the top off because it kind of shouldered in a little bit and I needed the full diameter to be sure that our lure is going to fit in there. And you can see I've got the two fluid levels marked with just some aluminum tape. The idea is to have the minimal volume that it would take to just submerge the lure in the fluid, but it's a little bit tricky because you've got to have equal parts of the two fluids.

(14:05):

So having the narrowest container that will fit your lure is actually the best way to go. And just like a spoon, you need to give it a light cleaning with some gentle soap. This is actually dawn soap and dawn is what Angel gilding recommends you clean it with. Before we move on, I'm going to put on some gloves because the silver solution will actually stain your hands. I'll hit it with a surfactant and this stuff angel gilding calls prep coat, and I don't know if I mentioned it before, but this also comes as a concentrate and you can mix it way ahead of time. In fact, it has unlimited shelf life even after a diluted and a little bit goes a long way with this stuff. And when you're doing this, be sure that you really inspect closely how well this stuff is working because it doesn't always prep the surface perfectly the first time you apply it. Sometimes you got to apply it a couple of times and I almost forgot to put my little waist pan in there. Give it a close inspection after you put the thinning agent on to make sure that there is no beading at all, that the water is laying on there really nice and smoothly. So I just rinse it off with distilled water.

(15:10):

I'm going to go ahead and just set it in there. The silver solution goes in first and I'll fill it up to the bottom line and I don't want to put it directly on the surface of the lure and I'll do the same with the reducer. At this point, I realized that I made a mistake putting the lure in there before I started putting the chemicals in. Now my chemicals aren't equal, and to make things worse, I grabbed the lure by the tail and not by the top of it, like I have it right here. And that made me have to put a lot more material just to cover the lure.

(15:46):

All right, that should do it. Check that out. I like magic and I'm going to rinse it really thoroughly right away. So the silver doesn't continue to work, but if it continues to react, it kind of gets dark and that looks really nice. You can see how nice and reflective it is, especially up on the face of it where there's no texture. You can really see that. It gives you a clear reflection and I'll go ahead and wash the rest of them and I'll put 'em on this little towel to drain. And this one, I did a little bit of an experiment by putting white paint on it and then wiping it off so that the white paint is just on the bottom of these scale patterns. We'll see what that does if it creates any kind of difference in the way the silver looks. Now notice that this time I'm grabbing it from the right end. The last time I grabbed it by the back and the bib took up too much space on the bottom, but we'll get it right this time. We've got the surface prepped. Put this stuff in up to the second line. This time some light stirring and it starts to sit off pretty quickly.

(16:58):

Again, it'll start turning brown and you just got to keep an eye on it. Once it starts to turn, make sure it doesn't go so far that you end up with a dark finish and that should have it. Let me rinse it off. And that white paint doesn't look like it did anything filled water. Let's go ahead and do the one that has not been clear coated. Now this one I expect to come out kind of muddled and not really very sharp because it doesn't have that crisp, glossy finish on the outside. It's really going a lot darker before it actually coats it. So you can see that's not a very good finish. It doesn't have that gloss coat, so you end up with sort of a dull gray. The rest is just a repetition of what I've already showed you. So I'm going to go through the last remaining ones pretty quickly and show you what they look like at the end.

(18:51):

Well, I am pretty happy with the whole process and the result, and I do think it actually gives you a more reliable finish because I think anyway, because it's submerged in the chemicals, you don't get that potential blotchiness that you get when you spray it on, which I've developed techniques to prevent that, but in the past it's been a real pain in the butt. So let's talk a little bit about the cost difference. Now, we already mentioned that we figured it last time that it was 75 cents per lure to do it by spray method and the cost of the undiluted, the concentrated chemicals, a dollar and 36 cents per milliliter. Good thing we don't use much. So the only thing, this cost captures all the costs including the prep agent, the tending agent, the clear coat base, and the clear coat top. So we don't really need to look at anything other than what changed for the concentrated chemicals.

(19:45):

So with the spray method, we used three milliliters to do 12 lures. So that's 0.25 milliliters per lure at that price per milliliter, that's 34 cents per lure. So for the dipping method, I'm going to stick with the recommended dilution rate at 10 milliliters per liter. Now we used 350 milliliters of the chemicals already diluted in water, so that's 3.5 milliliters of the chemicals. And we did 10 lures. So that's 0.35 milliliters per lure. And at the dollar 36 price, that's just at 48 cents per lure. So the difference is right at 14 cents. Now let's talk about diluting it at half the rate, which I experimented with and it works, but it does come out just a little bit thin. The plating just isn't as dense. I don't know if you can see it in the camera, but the one on the top just is a little lighter.

(20:44):

And the silver on the one on the bottom is just a little heavier layman. So I think you could probably find a sweet spot around seven milliliters per liter of water and you could probably get the price difference down really close or even slightly lower than the original cost. But let's just go with what they recommend. So the new cost would be right about 89 cents per lure. Now, if you're really concerned about every penny, because maybe you're going to be running really big production lines and you want to make sure you capture everything, there is a little bit of an added cost in the amount of distilled water you use, which I calculated to be about a penny and a half. And then you can probably add about a penny and a half for the added waste because you got to treat that, which is easy to do and isn't very expensive, but it does add a little more cost.

(21:34):

So realistically, everything included, thinking about every little possible cost, you're probably looking at something more like 91 cents per lure. But the cleanup is easier, the setup is easier. You don't have to have a spray booth and you don't have to have the spray gun. And if you want to save money, you can also use your own clear coat and not the automotive style one. Alright guys, thank you for watching. Don't forget to visit my other channel. It's called Sailing In Real Life. Check it out, see what I'm up to. Watch some videos, hit the thumbs up if you like them. If you find my videos informative and helpful, don't forget to give me a thumbs up. If you have additional questions, leave 'em in the comments. I'm happy to chat with you guys in the comments. And if you haven't subscribed, subscribed, especially if you're getting anything out of these videos, and I usually give my subscribers a little more attention when they're asking questions. Alright, I'll talk to you guys in the comments and I'll see you on the next video. And if you still have a lot of curiosity about all the ways that you can use to actually get a Chrome finish on your lure, click on the playlist you see on the screen right now. I think you'll be amazed about how many things you can actually do to get a lure to look like Chrome.