What are the mirroring chemicals and what do they do?

[Russ McMullin]

Don't worry, I'm not thinking of making my own. I just want to understand what the different solutions do, and how they should be handled.

How photosensitive are these solutions, and how should they be stored? How long do they last?

I notice that there is a reducer and activator for each of the gilding processes. Is there a "plain english" explanation of what is going on when the 3 solutions are poured together?

What is silver strip made of? How long does it last?

Russ

[Mike Jackson]

Russ,
For me, silver, angel gilding, and solution coppering is much like my truck. All it want it to do is reliably go when I turn the key, and I don't care to know much about the fuel injectors or timing belt. Many of us have the formulas, but not many of us care to have to buy all the ingredients in raw form and combine them into all the separate parts. There are probably only a couple of people around here that could tell you how they work, even if they knew what all the elements and compounds were. Sarah's husband is a chemist by trade, and he might be able to tell you, but it would probably sound like that 7:30 AM chemistry lecture we had in college. YUK>

If you are so inclined, search for a book called Mirrors by Bruno Schweig.

That's just my take on the subject.
Mike Jackson

[Russ McMullin]

I have no desire whatsoever to make my own chemicals, but it seems like experiments could be more meaningful with some basic understanding of the process. You have alot more experience making mirrors, so if you say it's not important, than I guess it isn't.

What I really want to know is how to care for the solutions. Do I leave them out? Do I store them in a light-tight cabinet? Do I have to use them in a certain amount of time or they go bad?

[Danny Baronian]

As with all chemicals they are best kept in a dark, cool dry place. Silver will degrade faster than any other chemical when exposed to light.

I believe Sarah's kits, unmixed have a useable shelf life of 1 year, but stored improperly would drastically shorten that life. Also, only mix up what your going to use. I have a silver kit purchased from Rick more than 3 years ago and it still works fine.

We did some angel gilding and silvering in the last few days, and the gilds turned out beautiful. Other than throughly cleaning the glass, steps that would help achieve a good gild prior to laying down the gold or silver: do a rinse of distilled water at about 80 - 90 degrees, and place your solutions in a tray of water at the same temperature. When applying the solutions get them on as quickly and evenly as possibly. If your doing this during the summer, and have high temperatures, forgo the heated rinse/chemicals.

Most importantly from an earlier post from Mike:

My first "off the cuff" comment would be if you got that good of results on your first piece, you should be pretty darned happy.

Others have spent more time getting those results.

[Sarah King]

Russ,

I'll ask Mike to write later about what the chemicals are doing to each other as you mix them together. I do think it helps to get good results if you have some idea of what those molecules are up to.

The silver is light sensitive, but not extremely. I've left mine out for days and it still works but, as Danny says, it will shorten the shelf life by more than you would like. The tin is also sensitive to light so keep those two in the dark.

The activator and reducer for the different mirror types aren't bothered by light at all. If you want to get really obsessive, the reducer prefers to be stored at room temp. But it takes more than a year for the reducer to decide that it has been too cold for too long (before it polymerizes - gets white stuff at the bottom of the bottle) so I keep everything in a box in the fridge, warm them up before I lay out the other supplies, and it usually works fine.

If the silver starts turning grey or the tin starts turning yellow then you know they are begining to loose their effectiveness.

[Guest]

This is how the chemistry works:
The original electroless plating method pioneered by Pratt in the 19th century, consisted of a solution of gold salt to which you added a chemical "reducer", leading to metallic gold. If done at the right speed and under the right conditions, you get a fine layer of gold on all of the surfaces that the liquid touches.

The activator is an alkaline solution that sets one of these conditions and various experimenters over the years have come up with other stabilizers and buffers to get the conditions even closer to where they need to be to get a good, solid laydown of gold.

Silvering works the same way but it includes ammonia which is unique to silver in that it forms "ammoniacal silver" which is more stable than the gold salt solution and so doesn't need an "activator".

The tin solution is a quite different situation. It is adsorbed onto the surface of the glass and helps the gold or silver adhere. You can gild without it but it won't stick.

As for storage, gold and silver salts should be stored in the dark as they degrade in the light back to the metal and lose their potency. The reducer will very slowly polymerize to the white deposit that Sarah refers to but it doesn't affect the chemistry. The tin solid will slowly go yellow as it oxidizes and if the color change is noticeable, you'll need to get a fresh batch. The tin solution goes milky as it is diluted because it hydrolyzes but it still works.

My overall recommendation is "cool and dark". Chemical reactions go faster as they get hotter so if you want to prevent decay, cool things down; if you want to speed up the mirroring, heat things up.

And, of course, these are chemicals, not foodstuffs. Don't eat them, drink them or let others do so. Wear gloves to avoid argyria, unless you like blue skin!

Mike

[Mike Jackson]

http://www.ebottles.com/showbottles.asp?familyid=1135

I bought a bunch of these bottles for my gold kit. I've always just stored my silver in the semi-transparent white plastic bottles or the squeeze/measuring bottles. We don't get too hot here in the mountains so I have never worried much about the heat factor.

Mike

[Guest]

I guess I get to do the dishes for a week! Silver DOES has an activator. That's why Sarah does the real work and I get to stay in the background - in the cool and dark....

[Mike Jackson]

Hi Mike King,
You can go back into your original chemistry lesson and make an EDIT to correct anything you need or want to change. Click the edit button just to the right and top of your resonse...fix it and click Submit. That's a nice feature on this version of the forum.

Mike Jackson