Battery gold plating pens - any good?

[Hello from Austria]

Dennis, as I did not understand what a ferule is I looked it up, and came up with this definition: "A flat ruler with a widened end, formerly used for punishing children" :-)

Would you mind expanding..?

[ps_bond]

Or just a synthetic artist's brush, with a lead soft soldered to the ferule. Exposed metal can be taped or covered with plastic tubing. My picture shows this idea when I anodised titanium Dennis.

I was wondering about the possibility of a brush with its own reservoir of plating solution. Very lazy, I know
Probably a nightmare for cross-contamination too.

[ps_bond]

Dennis, as I did not understand what a ferule is I looked it up, and came up with this definition: "A flat ruler with a widened end, formerly used for punishing children" :-)

The mind boggles!

On a brush, the ferrule is the tapered metal tube that helps bind the brush hairs to the shaft.
If you look at most file handles, they also have ferrules to stop the wood splitting.

[trialuser]

The brush / ferrule idea seems brilliant. I'm going to try that.
Regarding cleaning, if you are plating onto silver the preparation is much less of a performance than plating onto other metals.
I just scrub with a degreaser (washing up liquid) and give it 480 seconds in the ultrasonic, then a rinse under clean running water.
As far as I'm aware you don't need to 'activate' or electroclean or anything fancy.

Edit - there may be a problem depending on what material the anode (ferrule) is made from.
Ideally it should be platinum or carbon (according to spa), neither of which are common ferrule materials :-)

[silken]

I don't use anything special to clean the metal beforehand, just a bit of detergent and warm water on a soft toothbrush to remove traces of polishing compounds or I sometimes pop the piece in the ultrasonic cleaner. I've had no problems at all doing it this way so I'm reluctant to pay for the expensive pre-plating cleaners. That said, it is important that the metal is clean and free of grease so that you can make a circuit between the metal piece and the plating wand. Any grease or dirt can stop this happening or at least make it less effective. Hope this helps

Edited - ooops! Just noticed that trialuser posted practically the same advice before I got the chance to reply. That's exactly the same as what I do and it works perfectly well but I only ever plate silver, never any other metals.