Easy way to make copper foil

I have been trying to figure out how I can coat my tesla coil toroid with metal. I made it out of 4 x 90mm PVC elbows and short sections of the pipe to hold them together. The toroid will be a rounded square shape.

I was toying with the idea of painting it with conductive paints and copper electroplating it. But the conductive paints are rather expensive and not easy to get in a large enough quantities. I tried to make my own conductive paint with lubricating graphite and a latex based cork tile glue but it just doesn't seem to work that well. The latex glue is relatively conductive but the graphite I got seems to be barely conductive in its dry state as measured with my multimeter. At any rate I doubt the conductivity will be great enough to facilitate electroplating.

However I happened to try electroplating copper on to a strip of aluminium. When I pulled it out I found I was able to peel off the layer of copper which left me with copper foil.

I am currently trying this on a larger sheet of plumbing aluminium foil.

My idea is to araldite strips and sheets of copper foil over the PVC and THEN continue electroplating over them to seal the joints. If I sand down and compress the joints before hand it should work.

But I thought the technique might be useful in some electronic circumstances, e.g. small amounts of RF shielding that you can solder on to.

Is 90mm the pipe diameter? Seems unusually large unless it's roof gutter downpipe.

I'm not sure how you are winding the toroid. Are you fabricating a pipe core then passing turns of wire around it, each turn going through the hole in the middle. If that is the case, you probably don't want to make the core conductive because it will appear like a shorted turn and sink the power away. Also beware of the properties of some plastic materials in the presence of high energy RF fields. Some will heat up and deform or even ignite. A crude but not necessarily accurate test is to put a small piece of plastic in a microwave oven, if it doesn't melt it should be OK, if it does, treat it with suspicion.

If making it conductive really is what you need, you could consider copper tape, it's made by 3M and sold for EMI shielding. Looks like ordinary sticky tape but is copper on one side and glue on the other, you can solder it to close up gaps between the turns.

Brian.

boylesg said:

...However I happened to try electroplating copper on to a strip of aluminium. When I pulled it out I found I was able to peel off the layer of copper which left me with copper foil.

I am currently trying this on a larger sheet of plumbing aluminium foil.
....

Click to expand...

wow, i can think of a dozen uses for such copper sheets. Can you share what your electroplating setup is in more detail ?

betwixt said:

Is 90mm the pipe diameter? Seems unusually large unless it's roof gutter downpipe.

I'm not sure how you are winding the toroid. Are you fabricating a pipe core then passing turns of wire around it, each turn going through the hole in the middle. If that is the case, you probably don't want to make the core conductive because it will appear like a shorted turn and sink the power away. Also beware of the properties of some plastic materials in the presence of high energy RF fields. Some will heat up and deform or even ignite. A crude but not necessarily accurate test is to put a small piece of plastic in a microwave oven, if it doesn't melt it should be OK, if it does, treat it with suspicion.

If making it conductive really is what you need, you could consider copper tape, it's made by 3M and sold for EMI shielding. Looks like ordinary sticky tape but is copper on one side and glue on the other, you can solder it to close up gaps between the turns.

Brian.

Click to expand...

If you can imagine 4 x 90mm elbow joiners forming a square. That is how I have made the core of the toroid. The whole thing will be covered in foil - copper if I can get this electoplating thing working or aluminium foil otherwise.

People make a donut out of aluminium duct.