Coating Hypothesis - levitation
As a hypothesis, this should actually work quite well, I lack the materials to perform the experiment.
It involves the typical electroplating process, so that's all fine and dandy with no real changes there, except how you'd submerge the magnet in the solution.
Since we're dealing with magnets, it should be possible to keep the magnet levitated within the solution while it gets plated. The hypothetical process behind this involves a conductive disk of material, most likely aluminium or copper spinning underneath the solution, such as the disk being attached at it's center on a drill.
To test this to see if it's potentially viable, you should be able to cut a soda or beer can in half and attach that to a drill and put the magnet in a baggie, turn on the drill and see if the magnet hovers over the can and test to make sure it's not air movement using a coin of similar mass. If that works to keep the magnet levitated over the "Disk" (in this quick experiment, the beer can), then the disk should also viably work I'd think as well.
Anyone with the materials required for this experiment care to try it and post the results please?
Comments
That said if you have an old blender that you don't mind messing with that would be a really easy mod to it. I sadly do not but it's the basis for what I'm going to try and find in my garage.
EDIT: I won't be able to do this till next week also I'm traveling for work for a few days
That said, electroplating isn't the only way to plate something. There are methods to chemically coat something but that tends to be either silver or copper, neither of which will work as a magnet coating. Also, what metal did you plan on plating? because the only biocompatible one that can be plated is gold, and it's a shitty coating material which is why no one uses it. If you're talking about the base coat, that's not electroplated. And it couldn't be. The raw magnet would degrade very quickly in any plating solution. The base coat is plasma sputtered on in a vacuum to prevent degradation of the magnet.
Levitating a magnet like that is just fine and dandy (although the effect is far less than you're expecting, you can find video of it on youtube), but it's not actually a useful tool in this instance. It'll just add more pieces to an already delicate setup.
You're far better off spray coating a magnet with a polymer and uv curing it.