[ohohyodafarted]

As promised, I am reporting on the nickel plating of the 15G. Monday and Tuesday I spent time preparing the ultor ring for todays plating attempt. The area behind the bump on the ultor ring needed to be "masked" with a special material that prevents plating. We need to prevent the plating of the Kovar where RACS will be applying frit glass on the glass to metal interface area.

So I obtained a gallon of a material that is something like contact cement. It is orange in color and you paint it on with a small paint brush to the areas that will not be plated. It took 3 coats to get good coverage. Each coat needs to dry a minimum of 3 to 4 hours before re-coating. You can see the orange masking material on the ultor ring in the attached photos.

AFter the masking was completed I sealed off the end of the neck of the crt and made up a special cable with a couple heavy allegator clamps and a battery clamp from a set of automobile jumper cables. I used 2 strands of #10 stranded wire for a total capability of at least 60 amps.

At noon today I took the tube over to Exclusive Metal Finishing and Steve and I proceeded to plate the 15G ultor ring.

Step one was a short soak in hot alkaline cleaner, then a clear water rinse. Then we went into an acid electro clean tank with reverse polarity current at about 5 amps. Then rinse and into the sulfamate nickel electroplating tank. This solution is heated to about 130F and it is air agitated as you can see in the photo. Notice the beautiful emerald green of the plating solution. We plated at about 50 amps for 40 minutes. Plating looks rather nice so far and appears to be quite heavily plated.

We are scheduled to do the leak testing with the Helium mass spectrometer leak detector this weekend to see if the plating has sealed the leaks. This tube was previously leak tested and was found to have 3 leaks and we marked the location of the leaks so we know where to look for them.

I will report back with the results of the leak testing as soon as it is completed.