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Metal Vapor Deposition is not a difficult process to do. You put a clean
part in a vacuum chamber, pump it down to 1 x 10E-6 Torr, back fill with a
little ultra pure Argon and fire up the electron beam gun. All you need is a
high vacuum system, a chamber large enough for the part, an electron beam
gun (basically a filament and a magnet), a high voltage power supply and a
chunk of pure gold. I have all the equipment you need to do a canopy except
the large chamber and the chunk of Au. There is a lot of surplus vacuum
equipment in the Silicone Valley area, Hmmmmmm... Got any Canadian Maple
Leafs, Krugarands (sp), Mister T accessories???

My concern in coating a plastic part is outgassing. You may have to hold the
part at a high vacuum to get all the water and other volatiles out of the
part. This could take days, weeks or ?????

I recall that my father had a chemical spray system for depositing a
conductive film on non conductive parts that could then be electroplated. I
believe this is how plastic reflectors in tail lamp assemblies are made. One
time we gold plated a dragonfly (the bug not the airplane) using this
process. Perhaps there is a chemical process that could be utilized.

Perhaps a hard vacuum is not needed. As a teenager I built an electric car.
One day I managed to short the main buss of the battery pack with a 12 gage
copper wire. The wire exploded with a fire cracker report giving my hand a
nasty flash burn and copper plating my thumb and index finger. Before I
washed up I checked my thumb nail with an ohm meter and found it to be
conductive, thus demonstrating that some people are born to be engineers.

Regards
Brent Regan

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