School time in the Shed

By Rebecca Carson

Well, what have I been up to? Lots of things! For a start, Dad and I have been learning about nickel and copper electroplating. Very exciting!

The nickel is produced by bars of pure nickel bought on eBay. To make the solution, you mix some distilled water and some white vinegar in a plastic container and put the two nickel bars at either end. Then you connect them to the red and black clips of a battery charger and leave it switched on for a couple of hours. The liquid should turn green, just like a magic potion. We cleaned the water pump piston, so that there was no rust, and then we dipped it in an acid pickle. We used milkstone remover, which meant we had to wear goggles and big green gloves. We rinsed the pickle off with more distilled water and wrapped a copper wire through the hole in the piston, and then lowered it into the nickel solution. Then, we placed the two nickel bars at the edge of the container, connected them to the red clip and attached the black clip to the wire on the piston. We switched the charger on and waited for an hour or so. Soon the piston was starting to look shiny.

This gave us a first layer, so that we could add some copper plating to fill the pit marks. To make the copper solution we used copper sulphate, which was an old chemical called ‘Bluestone’, used to spray spuds to keep blight away. We mixed this in more distilled water, and it turned blue; not just blue, but BLUE! We used an old copper earth strap as an anode. First, we tried the experiment on an old nail, which turned bright copper colour after just a few seconds. I thought this was brilliant.

When the piston was put into the solution and the charger switched on, it soon turned copper too, but the 12-volt current might be too strong because there are black deposits on the piston. So, we are experimenting with a 5 volt phone charger, and changing the distance between the anode and the piston. Maybe I’ll learn more about this at my next school.

Lex and Harry are fitting robots at the dairy farm, and Harry says we can have the old pipes and fittings from the old parlour, when the robots take over the farm. We need these to circulate water through the pump, so we can’t do much more with that project for now.

On the last day of my Christmas holidays, we went to see a collection of BIG stationary engines owned by Adrian and Sammy Stewart. They started collecting engines 18 years ago. They started off with three Lister Ds, and their next engine was a Lister CS diesel, which Sammy said was not hard to restore. He also said, they were showing from the start. They first moved into the big engines when they realised just how impressive they were. Their first big engine was a ten HP Ruston Hornsby. At the moment, Sammy’s favourite engine is an 18 HP Ruston Hornsby, and the most unusual engine they have is an Inver seven HP which was manufactured in Larne, Co. Antrim.