Learn how to further protect your mirror from tarnishing.

English Transcription of Video:

Hi, thanks for stopping by Angel Gilding. I'm Alix. And today's quick tip is all about the galvanic copper backing. Now, galvanic copper is what we call a sacrificial metal, which makes it different than the other mirror layers that you'll see. And basically, when I say sacrificial metal, what I mean is on the back of many silver mirrors is a copper backing galvanic copper, and it serves the purpose to protect the silver. How it does that is any kind of airborne contaminant, sulfur, things like that, that might get under that paint layer of a mirror are going to go first to that galvanic copper backing and be neutralized before it could affect or tarnish our silver layer and then affect the appearance of our mirror. So this process is done in a lot of commercial mirrors. So if you've ever taken the paint backing off of a commercial mirror and you saw that it had kind of a pink copper look to it, what you were looking at there was galvanic copper.

Now, the process we're going to do today is the same process as you'll see in large scale production shops, but we have this setup in a way that you can do it in your own shop. Now what we have here is a plain silver mirror on flat glass. I use my pump spray assembly to silver, this piece of glass, and as you can see, it's still wet. I haven't allowed it to dry. I just followed the typical steps to make a silver mirror up into rinsing off the excess silver. And first I'm going to start with my iron powder. Now we do have the galvanic copper backing kit, and in this kit comes the iron powder, the galvanic copper concentrate, and the trigger spray bottle. This iron powder is the first step of the process, and what I want to do is apply a thin layer, get it as even as I can. You don't have to be very precise with this, but a light even layer, a heavy layer isn't going to give you any additional benefit.

Now, you may see that some people do this process with a liquid iron process, and what we find is actually the powder gives you a more consistent even coat. Okay? So once you feel like you've gotten a good amount, light layer of iron there, you're ready for the galvanic copper. Now, galvanic copper is not the same chemicals as the bright copper mirroring, so just keep that in mind. And it is just the one chemical. So this is a two 50 mil bottle, and you would dilute that with 750 mil of distilled water and put it in your pump spray bottle. I've got that here. And once it's diluted like that, it has a very nice shelf life, so you don't have to necessarily worry about only diluting as much as you think you'll need. You can go ahead and dilute that whole bottle and have this on hand for when you need it. And lemme move that out of the way for you. And now I'm just start spraying.

You're going to see this reaction happens pretty quickly. I want to spray over the surface of the full mirror. Keeping in mind I'm not looking for a flawless, beautiful finish. The adherence of this copper doesn't matter. Nobody's going to see it. It's sandwiched between my silver layer and my paint. What I do want to see is that I've got a good even coat. And as you can see, I'm kind of moving the bottle and using the spray to kind of push my iron powder around, get as much coverage as I can. I do like to tip my piece when I can if the piece is small enough and it helps me to just kind of move that iron powder all over the piece. Now, once you feel like you've got a pretty good coverage, like I said, it's not going to be pretty going to be flawless, but it's got the coverage of the protection of the silver that you need. You can just go ahead and rinse it off. This is just my regular distilled water here and I want to make sure any of that excess iron is washed off.

Okay, take a look. See. Okay, so I can see it's still a very nice, bright, reflective finish. It's got a little bit of a wave, a little bit of an imperfection. I'm not going to worry about that because I can see my silver is covered here. So all I need to do is tilt this to dry the same way I do all of my other mirrors. And once my piece is fully dried, I can go ahead and paint the back with any one of my backing paints. So leave us a question if you have any below a comment, any thoughts on future videos that you'd like to see, and be sure to subscribe to be notified of future videos and check out our website, angel gilding.com. Thanks.