How does plating work?
Look at the figure above: We have a metal object that we want to plate with another metal. First we fill a “cell” (a tank, vat, or bowl) with a solution of a salt of the metal to be plated. Most of the time the salt (nickel chloride in our example) is simply dissolved in water and maybe a little acid. In this example, the NiCl2 salt ionizes in the water into Ni++ ions and two parts of Cl- ions. A wire is attached to the object, and the other end of the wire is attached to the negative pole of a battery (with the blue wire in this picture) and the object is immersed in the cell. A rod made of nickel is connected to the positive pole of the battery with the red wire and immersed in the cell. The battery is pulling electrons away from the nickel anode (through the red wire) and pumping them over to the object to be plated (through the blue wire) Because the object to be plated is negatively charged (by being connected to the negative pole of the battery and having electrons pumped to it),
