[Jewelry making - Article 00039] - Re: [Orchid] Mercury Gilding

[Peter W . Rowe]

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>        I am looking for a shop to get a small mirror frame Mercury
>     gilded, this is a restoration and I have not found a electroplating
>     color that matches the other parts of the frame 

    James, I'm wondering if you could simply modify a plated coating to
    match. If the frame is silver, a thin gold plating will get paler
    with a bit of time as silver dissipates into the gold, and you could
    use that by gold plating, putting a very thing silver flash on it,
    then gold plating again, and then heating it up just a bit to get
    some slow diffusion. Might need some experimentation. But I'm
    guessing that the problem is not that the gilded gold is different
    karat or something, but rather just the effects of age and diffusion
    of the gold and silver into each other. If that's the case, then
    perhaps one could fudge it somehow. And simply burnishing a plated
    gold layer will change the surface markedly towards that of the
    mercury gilded look, which generally also gets burnished in some
    way. Annealing the plated layer also may change it's appearance in
    the right direction, and given that mercury gilding requires heating
    in any case, you're not doing anything the frame would not also have
    to endure if gilded... 

cheers
Peter

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