Silvering/mirroring glass, any ideas?

To silver part of a standard mercury discharge lamp for use as a video projector bulb, presumably less screen illumination , but 15 foot diagonal not necessary. No evacuation chamber available. Ideas so far, aluminium cooking foil , cut to a ribbon, and wound around; ground-off front and back of a photo-flood light bulb and fixed over as a collar; any other ideas?

-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

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N_Cook
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Google Brashear Process It's an old Amateur Telescope Maker's recipe

I used it 50 years ago

You need Silver Nitrate Ammonium Hydroxide Glucose A supply of de-ionized water

at that time (1950-60) every good sized town had a shop that Re-silvered mirrors. They used a two-component Sprayer to flood the glass surface with a Silver-ammonium complex and co-reacted it with a Glucose solution to reduce the silver solution to metallic silver, which plated out on the glass. It's messy, really requires a fume hood, waste disposal problems, can be an explosion hazard. I did it in a kitchen sink as a teen-ager! Silver cost about $.50 an ounce then.

Through my employers, I graduated to Evacuation Chambers and Sputter Coaters and learned to coat with aluminum, tungsten, platinum, gold, carbon.

I think ~10-25 pound sterling would get you the necessary chemicals and glass-ware plus a bag of Kitty-litter for waste disposal, less if you are good at scrounging. EG. you could buy "Fine Silver" from a Lapidary Shop, Glucose as a food suppliment, Potassium Nitrate as fertilizer, Sulfuric Acid from a Car Battery shop.

Yukio YANO Saskatoon , Saskatchewan Canada

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Yukio YANO

diagonal

around;

a

carbon.

Ta, an amateur astronomer's page now only on archive.org

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-- Diverse Devices, Southampton, England electronic hints and repair briefs , schematics/manuals list on

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Reply to
N_Cook

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