Our customers bring their jewellery and display items to us to be plated. Plating is short for electroplating, a process where an electric current bonds one metal to another. We have four primary types of gold plating services. Flash gold plating is the most economical way to make your display items or costume jewellery sparkle. It involves a very thin coating of gold over metal, less than 0.25 microns thick. This is just enough to provide a nice gold colour and an even finish.
Hard gold plating is more hard wearing. You can select the thickness of gold you would like deposited, from 0.25 microns to 10 microns. Typically, hard gold plating is done to a thickness of 2 microns. You also choose the colour of the gold you would like deposited. The colour is dependant on the gold carat you select. D&M Jewellery Finishers can offer 9ct, 18ct, and 22ct gold.
Just a word about microns. Micron is another word for micrometre, which is one-millionth of a metre. To put it another way, a micron is a 25th of a thousandth of an inch. You can see that flash gold plate is quite thin.
The higher the carat, the softer the gold is. For instance, 9ct gold contains 37.5% pure gold and 18ct gold contains 75% pure gold. The rest of the metal is comprised of alloys and it is these alloys that modify the colour of the gold. 22 carat gold is 91.7% pure gold and often the rest of it is made of 5% silver, 2% copper and 1.3% zinc.
We also do selective gold plating where you select which parts of the item you wish to have gold-plated. Our experts hand plate the item using our special tools, or we can “stop off” the areas you do not want plated and dip the item in our gold tank. This is an ideal way to emphasise the decorative designs on a display item.
We recently added rose gold plating to our services. Rose gold is a mixture of pure gold with copper which gives the metal a rose colour. Copper is a less expensive metal than gold so the price is lower than for yellow gold and copper is a much stronger metal than gold so rose gold is a great deal more durable. It is tarnish and corrosion resistant. We do hard rose gold plating up to 10 microns in thickness as well as flash rose gold plating.
For more plating information, contact us. While we are adept at working with gold plate, we do not plate watches. We can work with just about any precious metal and have the latest innovations in plating equipment and know-how with brush plating and tank plating. Talk to us about your special items and we can offer advice on the best gold plating solution.
D&M Jewellery Finishers also offer jewellery cleaning and jewellery polishing. As well as gold plating, we provide silver plating, platinum plating and rhodium plating.
