The 1902 National Cash Register Rescue Project: Update 3!

Hey everyone! I'm finally back with a proper update on the junkheap cash register's restoration progress, and things are looking better than I initially thought they would! Right off the bat, thank you to everyone who chipped in over Ko-Fi. The support over these hurdles has been wonderful, and it makes my heart full to know there's that much appreciation out there for a hobby I initially wasn't sure I had any business trying out. Y'all are the best. <3

Now, to the restoration! We're starting off with some much-needed "before" photos from the very beginning since it's been a hot minute since my last update. For those of you who are just finding out I do these posts, welcome! Above is the cash box of a 1902 nickel plated National cash register, and I purchased it in utterly horrible condition! :D

The main issue from the outset has always been the condition of the nickel plating. A ton of it has rotted off or flaked away thanks to the register being stored in the damp corner of some barn for a good long while. Besides that, this register has seen a lot of use. It was originally purchased for a tavern in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1902 and as far as I can surmise was used on and off in other businesses after the bar closed in 1911. I've found newspaper stubs from the 1970s lost inside the mechanism which tells me it was still being utilized as recently as fifty years ago.

Because of that wear and tear, and later because of how it was stored, the nickel plating has significantly deteriorated and the underlying bronze casting was allowed to heavily oxidize. After disassembling the chassis and washing all the metal with soap and water, it was easier to see the extent of the damage (see my previous updates). Some panels, like the rear one which oftentimes just faced a wall, were in excellent condition. Others were much less so, like the ones along the front and sides.

I hadn't set out to find a major challenge, but I'd taken one home anyway. Given the choice between reassembling the cleaned panels and letting them reoxidize even more, or attempt for the first time to put new nickel on them myself... well, let's just say I didn't take the easy way out. ;)

So, here we are, set up and ready to start. This picture might take some explaining, so bear with me.

The first step before I can re-plate the panels in new nickel is to strip all the old nickel off. The metal needs a clean surface to bond to. If I just plated over the old nickel, there's a good chance I'd plate on top of something that was getting ready to flake away. Every instruction I read about plating advised me not to do this, so instead I finally tried my hand at stripping. (nyuck nyuck!)

Plugged into that power strip is a foot-long immersion heater (big titanium rod that gets hot) and a temperature sensor that tracks the bath's temperature and turns the heater on or off depending on what I'm trying to maintain. In the case of this stripper, the bath's only about 120°F/48°C (take THAT UnitConversionBot). Hot enough to dissolve the stripping compound but not quite hot enough that I can't pull out pieces with a double-gloved hand.

I've also got a small agitator motor running in the bath to keep things circulating. It's about what you'd find in a fish tank. Fun fact, I checked the temperature ratings of everything I bought except that motor. This is called foreshadowing.

Once the stripping compound dissolves and starts working, the bath starts to take on a dirty coffee color. This is from oxides being formed as the nickel is pulled into solution. I'm out here in my garage with the door and window open for ventilation, but the main irritant from this step is the loose powder. Still, I'm wearing a respirator while I'm doing all this since the SDS sheets that come with the chemicals I'm buying don't beat around the bush. This stuff isn't great to breathe or touch, and I'm absolutely burning through gloves and old towels as I dip, rinse, and dry each panel.

Also a fun fact, the basin I'm using immediately formed a slow leak once it heated up. These are 7-gallon Rubbermaid bussing bins that are rated for high temperature restaurant dishwashers. They're rated for temperatures up to 200°F/93°C, which is why I bought them for this. The trouble is being caused by the spigots that I fitted onto the basins for easier draining. I'm guessing either the seals aren't meant for higher temperatures, I didn't screw them down hard enough, or I mounted this one close enough to the bottom lip that it can't form a perfect seal.

Either way, I had to watch this drip throughout the process. It never got beyond a very slow drip, but I'm definitely going to have to shave a few layers of wood off this bench when I'm done.

Pulling the first panels out of the stripper was... startling. I knew from the documentation that the stripper would deposit a layer of smut (hehe, smut) on the metal, but holy barking farts I didn't expect them to come out BLACK.

Luckily, this was perfectly normal! The stripper yanked every millimeter of nickel off these panels, leaving behind the original bronze casting.

Granted, I had to buy an entire second bag of stripping compound to finish this step. One thing I wish I'd been able to figure out when I made the initial purchase for all these supplies was how many square feet this stuff could work on before running out. I spent a lot of time waiting on FedEx because of all the start-stopping I had to do when something just ran out of chemical juice, but I suppose the alternative was buying too much and not needing it.

Leaks aside, cleanup with this setup is really easy. I figured with caustic chemicals, I didn't want to be pouring gallons of the stuff out over the lip of a wide container, so the spigots were a bit of last second inspiration that made a huge difference.

The buckets are designed for hazmat and cost as much as the freaking tubs - $25 a pop. Worth it for the security of knowing nothing's going to eat its way through them or let any critters inside. Last thing I need is to open my garage and find Bebop and Rocksteady stomping on my cruddy snow blower.

Since I didn't want to get railed in the wallet by Waste Management, who disposes of this stuff in town at a cost, I dropped the immersion heater in each bucket until what was left was a half-cooked slurry of heavy metal residue and water. This got scraped out into an old plastic container and brought down to WM, along with the soiled towels, and they happily charged me $40 and change for the hazmat disposal.

In the meantime, I had this whole mess to deal with. Before I could do anything else, I had to wash off all the nickel oxide and other nastiness that I couldn't rinse off in the garage.

Which promptly turned my utility sink into a smelly disaster.

But the end result of this step was pretty cool. Bare bronze, rather than flaked silver. What really impressed me was how thoroughly everything came off. I'm not used to seeing all that stippling just cleaned out like that. Usually I end up getting a bunch of polishing compound stuck in there, or there's lead paint that refuses to come out. I'd kill for this level of cleanliness on a brass register. @_@

Something you might notice is that the front plate for the cash drawer is still silver, and that caught me off guard too. I had to ask around before I finally got a plausible explanation from another antiques nerd. Supposedly the drawer fronts on all of National's nickel registers were cast out of German silver (which doesn't actually contain silver). It's apparently a lower cost nickel alloy, and it made more sense to cast the drawer front with it because it was the part of the register that was going to see the most wear and tear from constantly being touched and pushed on by the clerk. Nobody wants to pull a shard of nickel plating out of their thumb!

Something I noticed while I reset the garage for the plating steps was that I hadn't gotten all of the nickel oxide off some of the panels, and the flat spots that would have normally been polished were a dull matte texture. Throughout all my reading talking to people who have plated metal before, surface preparation was the one thing that kept coming up as a no-exceptions, must-do step. If the metal is dirty or just has some grease from a fingerprint left on it, that's going to show in the final plating or even cause the plating to adhere poorly and peel off.

So, as much as I hate sitting in the basement scrubbing at heavy metal panels, I went back downstairs and spent a few more hours giving the bronze a second run through the bath.

I also took the liberty of picking up some 3000 grit wet/dry sandpaper and glossing up the high spots. If I'm being honest, I was tempted to just start reassembling this thing right then and there. Having a register in bronze would have been killer and I have no doubt it would've looked great. But... that's not the goal here, and I had gotten a significant bit of help getting this register this far already.

Still, I can't resist a money shot. It's not nearly as shiny as it would be had I run it through the buffing wheel, but one thing I didn't want to do was clog up all that stippling with buffing crud. Plus I like the gloss next to the matte low spots. Makes it look fancy. :)

And just when I thought I was done washing these things... I got a little paranoid and decided to give them all a third dunk in the bath with some vinegar. This is my version of a final degreasing step since the acid and some scrubbing should pull off any fingerprints or schmutz that survived past the stripping stage. Which, in my mind, should be zero since I was gloved up throughout this process.

Still, paranoia wins out and everything gets a good dunk and scrub.

Which in the end seemed worth it, because the vinegar pulled out every last nugget of remaining oxide smut.

Bonus fact, my entire basement reeks of vinegar now. Fuck yeah, pickle basement. \o/

And here we are, back in the garage, ready to start plating.
Quick explanation of the setup:

That big ol' rod in the basin is my immersion heater. Beneath it is the agitator pump. The bath needs to be around 100°F/40°C for this step since I'm going to be flashing copper plating onto the bronze first. The copper anodes in the tank are wrapped in cheesecloth to capture the oxides that'll inevitably form on them and prevent them from floating around the bath. I ended up using a spare crossbar from a parts register as the bus rail that I'd suspend all the parts from during plating. I had to get a little creative.

This, I learned later, wasn't entirely necessary. Live and learn - I was flying by a set of instructions detailed by Caswell, which is the company I bought most of my plating supplies through. The idea is that flashing copper onto existing metal increases the adhesion and durability of the final nickel plate. I suppose for an antique that will mostly spend its time as a display piece, this amount of effort is kind of wasted. >_<

Naturally, I had a flat surface ready to put all the untreated panels on. In this case, it turned out to be a bedroom door I hadn't gotten around to cutting up and trashing. Now I have a little bridge to connect the tectonic plates that is my broken garage slab. :D

Anyway, back to plating! Since some of these panels were pretty big, I had to get creative on how they got oriented in the bath. This isn't perfect, but it'll have to work. The positive wire from the power supply gets clipped to the bus bar, which then attaches to the panel via a wire or wires.

The copper anodes get connected by a separate cable, which is then connected to the negative terminal on the power supply. The instructions I had suggested setting the power supply to 3V/3A, so that's what I did.

Also, please excuse my old barn shitkickers.

Pour in the magic blue solution and dilute with an equal amount of distilled water.

Check to make sure the settings are kosher, then push the green GO button and pray my garage's shitty wiring doesn't burst into flames.

Et voila! One panel is now plated in fresh copper! And once again I think to myself, maybe I should just make the whole register copper and assemble it?

:D "That's a terrible idea!" says my conscience, then kicks me in the gooch for good measure.

And wouldn't you know it, putting together a copper plated register wouldn't have been possible anyway because for some reason several pieces of the register flatly refused to accept the copper at all!

This wasn't an issue of the copper running out, either. It has something to do with the panels themselves. I'd put one in, and it'd plate immediately. The next wouldn't so much as react. The next would. So would the next. But then another dud.

I'm assuming this is something to do with chemistry, or something in the alloy of these failed panels. I genuinely don't know. This is about the point where I was told by a plater that the copper step I was doing wasn't necessary for a good nickel plating, so rather than chase my tail I decided to cut my losses and move forward. Still, the copper looks petty neat!

Now here comes trouble. Please don't laugh at the tiny white balls. They were meant to impede evaporation and of course I didn't buy enough to cover the surface area I was working with. :/

So, here comes trouble. This here is the nickel plating step. The big silver final boss.

You'll notice there's no electrodes or bus bar hooked up here, and that's because I chose to go the route of "electroless" plating for the nickel layer. I have been asked why I went this route more times than I can count, and the reason was that the buy-in was much less expensive and the advertised results were supposed to be better and more durable. Keep in mind I have never done metal plating before now so this is something I'm learning for the first time.

That is, of course, my way of explaining why this process bludgeoned away all my confidence and humbled the fuck out of me.

So! Setup! Remember how I said this was electroless nickel plating? That means the plating takes place with a purely chemical reaction, meaning I need the right conditions and catalyst to kick this off. What are those conditions, I hear you screaming at the neighbor's poodle? Why, they're hot as fuck, boi.

No really, they're super hot. Like, aggressively-melt-your-skin-off hot. The nickel bath needs to be ~185°F/87°C for the reaction to kick off, which is way too damn hot for me to be grabbing at metal with nitrile gloves on. My solution? Nitrile gloves, oven mitts, and a wooden spoon to lever the parts out of the bath.

Oh hey, remember when I mentioned that I didn't think to check the operating temperature range for that little agitator pump...?

Well fuck me, right? Can't use a pump if it's MELTED. This was the first problem I encountered, which forced me to occasionally stir the solution while I was plating panels. Again, the respirator went on because the fumes coming off this bath are absolutely rank. Even as I type, I'm still airing out my garage from this stuff. I'm just glad I kept my car in the driveway for the entirety of this process.

The second problem I ran into is hard to miss. Not only is the bath plating the metal I put into it, it's plating EVERYTHING. The plastic tub, the bottoms of the little balls, the wires, my immersion heater and its plastic housing... fucking everything is getting plated because I didn't realize that by adding an agitator pump I was creating a small static charge in everything that contacted the bath.

This ended up resulting in the nickel solution depleting way, way faster than it should have and is ultimately the largest part of the reason why I had to order another gallon of the stuff to finish the project.

Frustrations aside, the results coming out of this stink bath are hard to discount. The plating is solid and none of it looks flakey or terribly discolored. There are a couple spots here and there that are a touch darker, kind of like freckles, but they're not noticeable enough for me to really worry about.

Of course, the lid is the panel that decided the plating bath was done working. I left this guy in the bath for more than thirty minutes and it never got better than this during the first round. Thankfully, once I got the replacement gallon of plating solution in the mail, it finished plating without any issues.

The end results aren't perfect, but they look a heck of a lot better than they did when I first brought the register home. Because it's new plating, the finish is very flat and unpolished. This would have been made worse had I not taken the time to polish the underlying bronze, so I'm counting this as an overall win that the flat spots still have something of a shine to them.

Of course, not everything went perfectly. By the time I put the bottom frame in the plating bath, the new solution had run out of juice. I was already noticing it was getting depleted after several smaller parts had failed to plate fully, so I rushed the frame into the bath to get what I could out of what I had left. Ultimately, it didn't take on any new nickel.

The root cause, as far as I can tell, is that the bath setup itself was reacting to the plating solution even though I had swapped the tubs and hadn't replaced the agitator pump. I'd tried using wire to ground the tub, but the basin was still getting plated despite this. My guess is that the immersion heater was the source of the static, or it was just consuming the plating solution because it was bare metal.

Given how quickly the solution was depleting, I decided not to drop another $150 to replenish the nickel. As much as I'd like everything to look perfect and uniform, this was very quickly crossing the line into sunk cost territory. Buying the second gallon made sense because it let me get from 40% finished to 95% finished. Spending that much money just to tick off that last 5% doesn't wash in my mind.

And looking back at the condition this register was in when I found it, I feel more okay with making the decision to cut my losses and push forward.

This machine isn't going to look perfect even if the nickel had come out looking the way it had back in 1902. It's going to have wear and tear I can't fix. The cash drawer needs some serious repair still. The price flags will, at the end of the restoration, be as stained as they were when I brought the register home because they don't need to be stripped clean.

At the end of the day, this wasn't ever going to be a perfect restoration and that's okay. This register had as much a chance of turning into a salvage machine as it did a restoration, and the fact that it's going to come out the other side in working condition is success enough for me.

And the parts that didn't plate are small enough that I think they might actually add flavor to the register that a solid block of nickel might not. This may just be my optimism showing, but I'm kind of excited to see what a combination of nickel and bronze will look like when it's all put back together.

That being said, we're not quite there yet. All this new plating still needs a bit of a shine up.

Especially the lid, which plated over but did still come out a little funky. Weirdly, it's the most heavily oxidized part of the lid that still managed to look odd after the final plate. I figure someone out there with more experience in this might know why that is.

Polishing, like with the bronze casting, amounts to some light touches with 3000 grit wet/dry sandpaper. I didn't want to put much force into it since I'm sure the plated layer isn't that thick compared to what the paper will remove. I hit up the high spots to smooth things out, add a little gloss, and called it good.

Here you can see one of the parts that didn't get a full dose of nickel. It's the crosspiece that holds onto the serial number and branding plaques, all of which didn't plate either. It might look a little strange, but hey, no stranger than I look in the mirror. :)

Overall, the new nickel looks pretty nice! Leagues better than it did a couple months ago, and it smells a whole lot better too!

Hopefully, I did a decent enough job to avoid a haunting from Mr. White.

It ain't perfect, but I'll give myself a back pat for my first time trying. :)

The next step, since I do have some bare bronze exposed, will be spraying on a layer of protective lacquer. I can't pull the trigger on that right now because it's way too freaking humid outside, but once some of this damp cooks off I'll get some nice gloss on this metal. Until then, I'll be turning my attention toward cleaning up the levers and repairing the wooden cash box! Hell, I can almost see the finish line!

(Artist: FluttershytheKind)

If I've learned anything during this project, it's that I don't have a future as a chemistry horse. x_x Still, it's been nice learning something that's completely outside my usual wheelhouse. I don't know if I'll ever find another project that needs to be replated, but now that I have the equipment I suppose I'm in a better spot to try!

Thanks everyone again for showing so much support, chipping in, and just being sources of encouragement when I end up banging my head against the wall. <3

If you'd like to chip in to help with this or future restorations, here ya go! https://ko-fi.com/elbowdeepinahorse/ And thank you all so much. ^_^