diy So you liquid metaled your laptop but did y...

[TheMadMadMad]

So you gattered the guts to open your laptop and applied some LM to improve with thermal performance?
Great but further down the road you see your temperatures going vulcanic and you open your laptop only to see that you LM dissolved into the Copper heatsink?
And now? the stain doenst go away, you hit it with sandpaper but its still there. You decide that you dont want that stuff anymore in your laptop and switch back to normal silicon based TIM.
Why? 

So im 23 year ol Hardware-Killing-Enthusiast that hasnt succeded yet. 
I apply LM everywhere, my i5 6500 (non-k) is running at 4,49ghz with 1.31v at the mid 60 degrees hitting it with prime95. 
Cooled by an arctiv freezer 13 i've purchased for 13€ on amazon. 
My old Laptop ran LM, my friends pc i bulid is running lm.

As the days went i by and i got dull of my old Asus g750jh and all of its chunkiness i wanted something thin and light. 
So i did the only rasonable thing and bought a Macbook off ebay.
A 2015 15" Macbook Pro A1398 with core i7 4850HQ 16gb RAM and the Radeon 370 something something for 1000€.

I do really like it especially the force touch trackpad (that still blows every windows one out of the water) and its 16:10 hig-res screen.
Something out of the windows wolrd with comperable key aspects like high res 15" screen with a taller aspect ratio as 16:9 (like a surface laptop or book) would set you back more money for less performance.
Yea i could get the Surface Book 15" with a 1060 but that thing is completly glued shut and i wanted to keep my kidneys. 
Sooooo i chose a Macbook.

The battery still runs fine with it 650 cycles+ giving me 4-5h unplugged. 
The only thing bothering me where the thermals and yea i get the irony. 
Who could be so dense to buy a macbook and complain about it thermasl afterwards? The answer is: Me!

So i opened it up, removed about 5kg of dust and changed the TIM to arctix MX4. It helped, it actually helped a lot.
But who am i telling it the thermals are still shit. 
By typing yes > /dev/null 8 times into the terminal you can stress all 8 cores of your CPU and by also running heaven you can sear a steak on that thing.
90 degress at both fans max rpm while boosting to 3.3ghz - toasty and loud.
Naturally i wanted to LM it, but thinkind "This is a macbook, you cant just smear that stuff into it. You gotta do things right"


So lets finish the headline shall we:
So you liquid metaled your laptop but did you nickelplate your cooler?




Quick run down on how to, it isnt really that hard.

You need:

PURE Nickel - i used Nickel wound guitar strings ( only the outer winding is pure nickel, the core is steel) 
A Jar -  I used one from hot doggs as it was tall enough for my heat sink
A Powesupply - Preferably high voltage, maybe 20v from am laptop charger it needs to be DC (Direct current!)
Wires to connect everything and maybe some crocodile clips
AA Batteries 
Vinegar - Plain old Vinegar with at leas 5% acid
Some Salt

Wiring up:
Unwind your Nickel and coil it up so that its about 10-15 cm in lengt and looks like a stick.
You need two Nickel sticks.

Connect both positive and negative to your nickel sticks (anothe and kathode for scientific terms)
Pour your vinegar into the jar and add the electrodes (your nickel sticks). Watch that they dont touch each other.

Making your Nickel Acetate: (The goo you gonna nickel plate with)
Check again that your electrodes (nickel sticks) dont touch and power up your psu.
Add a bit of salt to increase the electrical conductivity of your vinegar.
A BIT OF SALT
till you see a fair amount off bubbels coming from one of your electrodes.
The bubbleing electrode is your negative, mark this one somehow.
 Wait till your solution turns green. (takes time, about 4-6h for me with 19v PSU)

Like this:

You may see that one of your nickel sticks gets completly dissolved (this is perfectly normal as the nickel is now in the vinegar, replace it)

Preparing your part:
Clean the surface you wanna plate, maybe polish it but make sure there is no oils, fats, oxydation or any other shit on that.

Plating:
Take out the electrodes, you can plate with the PSU if you want but it wont give you the best results.
Attach some wire to your AA Battery (idk get creative i used tape and two in parallel but you dont need to)


Now connect your positive to your nickel anode (nickel stick) and your part to negative
Put them into the Nickel Acetate (the green goo you just made)
Make sure they dont touch and that everything you wanna plate is submerged:

Wait
give it 10 Minutes, the part should bubble sligthly.

Done
Congratulations you did it!



Now be dissapointed about your thermal results as temps only dropped 4-5 C at Syntetic load with fans on max.


Side by side:

 

FAQ:

My Nickel Rubbs away: aka iam to dump to clean my part.

Aluminium? No, it wont work with aluminium. For all i know you need to copper plate your aluminium first. (Same process but with copper electrodes and your goo should turn out blue)

No you shouldnt drink it, dont even ask. its poisonous.

Ask your local garbage disposal, dont pour it down the drain. 

My Solution is cloudy and or not green: your nickel wasnt pure. try a diffrent source.

My part looks all black and burnt: you used to much voltage and got the elecetrodes to close

Help i died in the process? you may inhaled chlorine gase because you put waaay to much salt in it.

It doesnt taste at all like mountain dew? Take another sip or listen to me that you shouldt drink it its poisonous. 

My solution turned out yellow? you peed in it didnt you? or you bought nickel platet steel stripps of amazon as i did in my first try.