We imagine that electroplating is like making PC boards or soldering surface-mount chips. Before you’ve done it, it seems like a lot. Afterward, you can’t remember why it was such a big deal. [Kovancapol] wants to show you how to plate a mirror-finish nickel over your tools, and while it looks like a lot to set up, we are guessing that it gets easy once you have everything together.

There is a bit of chemical setup, as you might expect with reagents like nickel sulfate and nickel chloride. Then there’s the glassware, nickel anodes, and a power supply. As you can see in the video, the results look very nice. We can’t help but wonder what other uses you might have for this process.

A conductive coating on a 3D print might be feasible. We aren’t sure soldering PCB traces would be worth it since nickel gets hard to solder as it oxidizes. You can mix and match plating for some pretty impressive results.