Anybody ever have a mirror resilvered? What did it cost? Is it something I can do myself? Is silver even used anymore?

August 9, 2004 1:32 PM

Anybody ever have a mirror resilvered? How much did you pay for what size? Is it something I can do myself? Is silver even used anymore?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders to shopping (8 comments total)

I'm sorry - I don't have an answer - I'm just wondering what this means. Do you keep the glass and the frame/backing and just replace the layer in-between? Or is it necessary to replace the glass, too? Sorry for the noise.
posted by scarabic at 5:00 PM on August 9, 2004

I think they sell either peel-n-stick stuff or spray paint stuff that does this...i don't know about the quality tho. There's Krylon looking glass (mirror) paint (mentioned here).
posted by amberglow at 5:44 PM on August 9, 2004

There's a howto fairly high on the Google list for "howto silver mirror". It's here: How To Apply Silver. It's in some weird CSS thing that doesn't work exactly right in Firefox/Mac, but you get the idea...
I bet you want to be pretty careful with some of the chemicals they list.
posted by spacewrench at 6:13 PM on August 9, 2004

That looks really dangerous, spacewrench. I'd test the spraypaint stuff on a random piece of glass to see how that works before i started playing with chemicals.
posted by amberglow at 6:50 PM on August 9, 2004

i suspect it works well if you can get the glass clean first. i once painted stuff onto glass, including metallic paint, and looking from the other side the finish is "perfect" because it's just as smooth as the glass. do you see what i mean? you don't need to worry about brush marks on the side you're painting, as long as the coverage is solid from the glass side.
however, if there's old silver stuff on there, i bet it could look really ugly...
posted by andrew cooke at 7:09 PM on August 9, 2004

I'd bet that modern mirrors use vacuum-deposited aluminum instead of actual silver. But doing that at home would take a lot of work.

The silver-nitrate-and-ammonia method spacewrench linked to sounds familiar. Those chemicals aren't terribly dangerous, IIRC, as long as you're careful. I think it'd be fine if you were reasonably careful with them, and make sure to find out the proper way to dispose of the leftovers when you're done (depending on where your drains drain to, it may or may not be ok to just dilute-and-flush). [MSDS for silver nitrate in pure form] [MSDS for silver nitrate in solution]
posted by hattifattener at 9:54 PM on August 9, 2004

I believe this is the link you are looking for.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 9:04 AM on August 10, 2004

If you're in California, give Craftsman Furniture Service a call; they do mirror resilvering, and I'm sure Steve would be happy to talk to you about the process even if you don't end up having them do the work.
posted by Mars Saxman at 9:12 AM on August 10, 2004