I had been looking for an inexpensive vintage oil can for some time to use for my antique Bertram Metal lathe. I found this old can in a bag filled with rusty tools and sawdust at the local antique shop and with a price of $5 I was happy to take it home and see what I could do with it.
In this video I do a complete restoration and then take it way beyond by experimenting with etching, electroplating using Copper and Nickel and painting.
I use a new camera to shoot this video, it is the Canon EOS M50 Mirror-less with the kit lens and a 36 yr old adapted manual focus lens.
There were a surprising 244 separate videos taken to create this detailed video of the restoration, please let me know what you think in the comments, I'd be happy to hear them.
Timestamps:
Overview 0:01
Testing 0:20
Cleaning 0:54
Stripping 2:10
Wet Sand 3:35
First Etch 5:06
Copper Plating Test 6:27
Nickel Plating Test 7:37
Copper Plating over Nickel 8:32
Re-etch 9:35
Final Plating 11:11
Making Gasket 11:57
Emblem 14:09
Testing 17:31
Into the Lathe 17:40
Thanks and Subscribe 17:49
AMAZING RESULT 18:00
A special thanks to my family for providing the equipment for a much better video and sound quality.
#restoration
#vintage
#old
If you watched the video, you can see that I struggled with the copper plating. My best understanding of this is that iron within the steel is highly attractive to copper. Because of this, the copper will coat the material quickly without adding a current, when a current i applied, the copper has already coated the steel and prevents bonding of the dis-similar metals.
On the other side, nickel is not attracted by iron in this way, so it works as a good intermediate metal. I did not want to use the copper as the finial finish, so I was able to skip the copper plating on the oil can.
I used Tremclad paint here only because that's what I had on-hand. The Tremclad also remains flexible unlike some lacquer based paints. This area has to be flexible since it will be deformed on a regular basis.