Better electrode material? - Gold, silver, titanium, etc...

[Gary Diamond]

I've thought about use of stainless foil. I think it would defitly be worth expementing with if you can find a supplier. I've never heard of a 316 foil before, and don't know if it could be made the same way soft meatles are used to make foil.
One complication that may come up, with a foil cell, is flatness. It would be hard to keep the foil completely flat, but 316 is quite stiff compared to any metal foils I've ever worked with, so this may not be much of a problem.
Nickel foil is another option, which may or may not be cheaper than SS in foil form.

They use it as a wall paper covering over your dish washer, stove, ref i'm sure its takes a nak to learn how, but laying on to a 6x6 piece of 1/8 inch plastic should not be to hard

I will find a source and we can all give it a shot cutting and drilling 1/8 stainless is a ***** to say the least, it kind of takes all the fun out, and is that not 50% why we do this
Gary

[Gary Diamond]

Hope this is real SS

http://www.ezfauxdecor.com/Stainless...MetalFilm.html



This looks like real stainless steel foil with glue

http://www.novafilmsusa.com/metalFoil.php

[Dr. Jerryrigger]

Hope this is real SS

http://www.ezfauxdecor.com/Stainless...MetalFilm.html



This looks like real stainless steel foil with glue

http://www.novafilmsusa.com/metalFoil.php

nice find Garry!
Foil would be a great neutral plate. Think about the resistance of a .100 sheet compared to a .005 sheet. For outer plates, I theorizes, you would be better off with a thicker plate or better yet a copper plate w/SS foil covering it. This may be possible with out glue, just good compression in standard dry cell construction. But if the water gets to the copper you will have to get a new copper plate, unless you have a surface grinder at your dispose.

[Gary Diamond]

I just ordered some 304 stainless steel 2 mil foil will let you know how it works out glued to 1/8 plastic

[Gary Diamond]

Here is some 12mil thick stainless i would think it would be easy to cut and glue to plastic

http://cgi.ebay.com/Stainless-steel-...1%7C240%3A1318

[Bassman]

Several years ago, I installed new buss bars in a plating shop. They were doing hard chrome plating and their solution was called, I believe, chromic acid. I know that it would burn you to get it on you. After we bent and cut the copper bars to fit, they would plate them with silver before we installed them. This was to protect the copper as the chromic acid would dissolve the copper but wouldn't effect the silver.
I don't know if this will help you as silver is expensive but you might talk to some platters and they might give you some ideas on what you could use.

[Mahjin]

Copper will just not work. If the solder is lead based the electrolite will eat the lead for lunch quickly and if it is silver solder it will corrode fast. I also looked into electroplating a copper plate with platinum. To have .5 micron's platinum electroplating on a 6X6 copper plate both sides was $265.00. Plus you had to provide the copper and pay for freight. In researching electroplating any metal I was told that using any type of electroplated metal in the cell would not work. I am not sure if it is true but was told by the electroplating company that the plating would stay on one side and come off the other side quickly. I ran some tests with solid lead plates but in just a few minutes they get eaten up and shorted out. Brass is supposed to work fairly well but when I checked on the price it was more than 316L stainless. I wish someone would find a better more conductive alternative to stainless but I am just not sure one is available.

Larry

Larry

If you could figure out a diy method of electroplating wouldn't it be possible to use the platinum out of discarded spark plugs?

[H2OPWR]

If you could figure out a diy method of electroplating wouldn't it be possible to use the platinum out of discarded spark plugs?

I have done some more research on electroplating since that post. It simply will not work on an HHO device. It will stay on one side of the plate and come off the other.

Larry

[ElectricSquid]

Has anyone ever given hard drive plates a try as an electrode?
They fit into a piece of PVC like they where meant to go there. I think building a plate array out of a bunch of them would be fairly easy to do.

I'm just worried that the material they are make of might degrade in a KOH solution.

This is what Wikipedia has to say about what hard drive plates are made of...

A typical HDD design consists of a spindle which holds one or more flat circular disks called platters, onto which the data are recorded. The platters are made from a non-magnetic material, usually aluminum alloy or glass, and are coated with a thin layer of magnetic material. Older disks used iron(III) oxide as the magnetic material, but current disks use a cobalt-based alloy.

The plates I have here are non-magnetic and electrically conductive. They come from hard drives 20G and 40G drives built around 2001-2006 from various manufacturers.

[iiapoxii]

there was a video i saw on metacafe.com where a guy used exactly this method. although he was using them in a wet cell configuration, but it worked great. what he did, is he took i think 6 plates, and had them spaced with a plastic spacer, and cut a notch in each plate for the connection. one set of plates were all attached as + and the other set of plates were all -. when he dipped it into his solition, it seemed to work very well. ill find the link.