Why Is Nickel Often Used For Casting?

Those first few weeks and months of a baby’s life are to be cherished, and one way to make them last a lifetime is by casting every contour and wrinkle of their feet or hands in a long-lasting casting.

We offer a lot of different options from beautiful translucent glass to gold, silver and bronze, but one of our more popular options is a nickel finish.

The main reason why it is used is the same reason why gold, silver and bronze are so often used for immortalising precious moments; nickel is astonishingly long-lasting in a way that is often underrated.

Most nickel that is used for nickel-plated finishes such as the ones seen in our custom casts are typically an alloy known as nickel silver that is used to plate our bronze castings. Despite the name, nickel silver does not have any silver in it, but we can show comparisons between nickel and solid silver.

This is a combination of nickel, copper and zinc that provides the same silvery finish you expect from nickel or stainless steel but is far more resistant to corrosion than most metals and far more durable in general than most metals outside of gold, silver, bronze, platinum, titanium and other similar heavy-duty metals.

The strength comes from the zinc content, in a process similar to the galvanisation that makes stainless steel less prone to rusting. Unlike stainless steel and other, similar alloys, it is more durable and resilient, so it will allow cherished memories to last.

It is also less prone to tarnish, particularly for statues and ornaments such as castings and statues, meaning that it will endure alongside the memories they are designed to immortalise.

It is even more hard-wearing than pure silver, although most statues and castings made from solid silver are more likely to use sterling silver instead for this exact reason.