could you teach me in some way, Kephra, to gold plate quartz? I am a jeweler and would love to give it a shot!
I have plated quartz with gold thousands of times, as well as chrome, silver and nickel. But the way I did it was by evaporating the gold in a vacuum chamber allowing it to condense on the quartz. Usually, I evaporated chromium onto the quartz first as it bonded better. The gold started out as wire, cut to a specific length, and put into a tungsten filament. High current through the filament evaporated the gold.
That's the only way I know to do it except by
sputtering, but I didn't personally use that method. As you can guess, the equipment to do either of these methods is terribly expensive.