Text item: Text_1 An additional comment to John Monaghan's excellent reply to Paul Walker. Routine maintenance of the anode baskets definitely improves plating consistency. It avoids changes in the copper surface area distribution as the older (smaller) nuggets settle to the bottom of the basket. It also keeps sludge choked bags from being a problem. We made a sieve by drilling holes in a polypropylene plate that fit half way down into a large bucket. This allowed us to dump the basket out, rinse off the sludge and sort out the too small anode fragments. Nuggets large enough to not pass through the sieve were reused. Never reuse old anode bags, and leach out the new ones before putting them on the basket. We found that when we used enough baskets to get good current distribution in our tanks the copper concentration would rise because of all the surface area. Our trick was to place a length of small plastic pipe in the baskets before filling them with copper. This reduced the available volume in the baskets uniformly top to bottom while providing the same effective current distribution. A length of larger diam. plastic pipe is useful to slide copper nuggets into the top of the baskets on-line without much chance of them ending up in the bottom of the tank. It's also handy for knocking the copper down into a tightly consolidated mass in the basket. Andy Magee - Applications Engineer Rogers - Circuit Materials Unit Tel: (602) 917-5237 Fax: (602) 917-5256 E-Mail: [log in to unmask]