Things To Get Right When Preparing For Electroplating Metal Finishing

Industrial & Manufacturing Blog

When parts need an upgrade in the durability or aesthetic department, they're often treated with electroplating metal finishing. It has been done for a long time now and you can have success with it if you focus on getting a couple of things right throughout this process.

Pretreatment

Before you ever send parts through an electroplating metal bath to receive better qualities, you first have to go through a pretreatment process. It's going to help you get the best results out of this plating process because you're essentially removing any contaminants that may be present on the surface of said parts.

During this pretreatment process, you may have to use certain cleaners and complete multiple cleaning cycles until all contaminants are proven to be gone. Only until this is completed can you successfully complete electroplating metal finishing and get refined results.

Cleaning Analysis

Whatever type of cleaning you performed during the pre-treatment process for electroplating metal finishing, you want to test out the results just to make absolutely sure you're ready to go through with this process. In that case, you must now focus on cleaning analysis.

There are a couple of tests you can perform depending on what you were trying to remove from the surface of your metals. For instance, if you targeted things like dirt and other residues, you can simply use a clean white cloth. It will show if there are still residues you need to remove or not.

Plating Environment Setup

The last major preparation when completing electroplating metal finishing is getting the plating environment set up. You have to manage things like selecting a plating solution, choosing a structure to hold it, and figuring out how to safely administer a current. 

There are companies you can hire that can help you get this environment set up. That would save you time as well as prevent you from making any costly mistakes. Then you'll be able to complete the plating process without delays because your environment will already be perfect. Or you may just decide to send your parts off to a plating company that already has this environment set up. It's completely up to you.

Electroplating metal finishing is the go-to plating process for parts that require special attributes, be it more durability or luster. If you can focus on the most important stages of this plating process, it will be easy to maintain controls that bring forth optimal parts at the end. 

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31 January 2022

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