Re: Silvering/mirroring glass, any ideas?

N_Cook wrote:
To silver part of a standard mercury discharge lamp for use as a video
projector bulb, presumably less screen illumination , but 15 foot diagonal
not necessary.
No evacuation chamber available.
Ideas so far, aluminium cooking foil , cut to a ribbon, and wound around;
ground-off front and back of a photo-flood light bulb and fixed over as a
collar; any other ideas?


--
Diverse Devices, Southampton, England
electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on
http://home.graffiti.net/diverse:graffiti.net/



Google Brashear Process
It's an old Amateur Telescope Maker's recipe

I used it 50 years ago

You need Silver Nitrate
Ammonium Hydroxide
Glucose
A supply of de-ionized water

at that time (1950-60) every good sized town had a shop that Re-silvered mirrors. They used a two-component Sprayer to flood the glass surface with a Silver-ammonium complex and co-reacted it with a Glucose solution to reduce the silver solution to metallic silver, which plated out on the glass. It's messy, really requires a fume hood, waste disposal problems, can be an explosion hazard. I did it in a kitchen sink as a teen-ager! Silver cost about $.50 an ounce then.

Through my employers, I graduated to Evacuation Chambers and Sputter Coaters and learned to coat with aluminum, tungsten, platinum, gold, carbon.

I think ~10-25 pound sterling would get you the necessary chemicals and glass-ware plus a bag of Kitty-litter for waste disposal, less if you are good at scrounging. EG. you could buy "Fine Silver" from a Lapidary Shop, Glucose as a food suppliment, Potassium Nitrate as fertilizer, Sulfuric Acid from a Car Battery shop.

Yukio YANO
Saskatoon , Saskatchewan Canada
.

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