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Deviousness `ChewedKandi has certainly gone out of her way to keep the vector community on the right path. Always making sure that her talents are infinitely scalable, Sharon has put her bezier curves to excellent use, and firmly anchored herself as an inspirational leader. We're absolutely delighted to bestow the Deviousness Award for June 2013 to `ChewedKandi. Congratulations, Sharon! Read More
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Sta.sh
Thank you, love your work
I also wanted to ask you a question...
So I'm in the midst of starting to learn the process of electroforming at school. I love the outcomes you get with these forms. I'm curious what material you initially used to electroform on? I'm going to be doing my first experiments with it in the next few weeks and I would love to know what materials are possible to use.
I originally started electroforming on a nylon fiber. In order to do that, I have to apply a special conductive paint to it and let the copper build up really slow, otherwise, I would get these nodules all over. Some pieces would be left in over night or even longer. I went with the nylon so I could burn it out before applying enamel and the powdercoating to what I had electroformed. Now what's kinda backward about the way I was electroforming was that non-metallic things are harder to plate and depending on the conductive paint you use, it can be pretty toxic and smell bad. I think you could basically plate anything, you just need to make sure you can get enough conductivity happening. I also was told by a friend that she plated those elbow pasta noodles and it worked fine. However, I have also heard that organic materials will ruin the plating bath so you need to seal the item to be plated really well with something like wax. I was told this at my undergrad, but the friend who did the noodles said she didn't have to do that and currently at my grad school, people have plated organics also without a protective coat. So that might depend on your school. As far as metal goes, as long as it's clean, it should work just fine and it doesn't need the nasty conductive paint. Which is what I currently am doing now, no fibers, just the wire, which is a stainless steel, so whether it's ferrous or non-ferrous seems to not matter. Also, a possible alternative to the nasty conductive paint is a spray paint that contains a bit of metal in it, like a metallic color. I've been getting Ace hardware's copper spray paint and have used that to successfully electroform a nylon crocheted form. However, this might have limitations as one of the other grads tried to use it to plate on her ceramics pieces and it didn't work. She ended up using the standard conductive paint, which worked.
That's about it, I think. I would just play around and see what works for what you want to do. Also, rotate the piece occasionally while it's in the bath, this should help get a more even coverage. Anything that has really recessed areas won't plate as much or at all compared to areas that stick out farther.
Let me know how it goes!
I wish i could do that myself! But the process seem to be verry hard..