Since the brush has to be kept wet by allowing water or its equivalent to drip upon it, it is usual to make a tin trough over which the brush can revolve, and to further protect this by a tin hood to keep the liquid from being thrown all over the room. In many works the brush is arranged to lie partly in the liquid, and this does very well if the hood is effective.
There is a superstition that electro-deposits stick better to scratch-brushed surfaces than to surfaces which have not been so treated, and consequently it is usual to scratch-brush surfaces before electro-deposit. However this may be, there is no doubt that adherence and solidity are promoted by frequent scratch-brushing during the process of depositing metal, especially when the latter tends to come down in a spongy manner.
Gilt surfaces — if the gilding is at all heavy — are generally dull yellow, or even brown, when they come from the bath, and require the scratch brush to cause the gold to brighten, an office which it performs in a quite striking manner. The same remark applies to silvered surfaces, which generally leave the bath a dead white — at all events if the deposit is thick, and if ordinary solutions are employed. In either case the touch of the scratch brush is magical.
Burnishers of steel, agate, or bloodstone can be bought at the shops where scratch brushes are sold, and are used to produce the same brightening effect as can be got by scratch-brushing. The same solutions are employed, but rather stronger, and the burnisher is swept over the surface so as to compress the deposited metal. Burnishing is rather an art, but when well done gives a harder and more brilliant (because smoother) surface than the scratch brush. On the whole, steel burnishers are the most convenient if in constant use.
If the burnishing tools have to lie about, steel is apt to rust, unless carefully protected by being plunged in quicklime or thickly smeared with vaseline, and the least speck of rust is fatal to a burnisher. In any case the steel requires to be occasionally repolished by rouge and water on a bit of cloth or felt. The process of burnishing is necessarily somewhat slow and tedious, and as a rule is not worth troubling about except in cases where great permanence is required.
The burnisher is moved over the work somewhat like a pencil with considerable pressure, and care is taken to make the strokes as uniform in direction as possible; otherwise the surface looks non-uniform, and has to be further polished by tripoli, whitening, etc., before it is presentable.
The most convenient solution for general purposes is an 8 to 10 per cent solution of the double cyanide of silver and potassium together with 1 or 2 per cent of "free" potassium cyanide. Great latitude is permissible in the strength of solution and density of current. As commercial cyanide of potassium generally contains an unknown percentage of other salts, which, however, do not interfere with its value for the purpose of silver-plating, the simplest procedure is as follows.
For every 100 c.c. of plating solution about 7 grms. of dry crystallised silver nitrate are required. The equivalent amount of potassium cyanide (if dry and pure) is 5.2 grms., but commercial cyanide may contain from 50 per cent upwards to 96 per cent in the best fused cyanide made from ferrocyanide only. An approximate idea of the cyanide content can be obtained from the dealers when the salt is purchased, and this is all that is required.