Starting a small plating business

A. Hi Clayton.

Several people on this thread suggest that it's never a good idea to buy a plating shop, and although I understand, I wouldn't be quite that negative.

The CCAI (Chemical Coaters Association International) is a fine organization but in my experience their focus is not in electroplating; that subject is more the purvey of NASF (National Association for Surface Finishing) -- so you might check if there is a chapter holding meetings in the Charlotte area, and you should definitely plan on attending NASF's "SurFin" in June.

I have never heard of a broker/agent who specializes in metal finishing plants, so can't recommend one, but I would urge you to retain an environmental lawyer before attempting to negotiate a purchase.

Although plating jobshops tend to plate most everything, my own opinion is that if you are solely a "commodity" plater, it's an awfully competitive business. But if you can find a niche -- perhaps oilfield stuff or things you dealt with in your father's shop, or something that especially interests you -- that's a very different thing. I think you can appreciate the 'boutique' possibilities of today's economy vs. the commodity business where OEMs scour the world for a tenth of a penny per pound savings.

If you can find a relatively new facility which is not prospering because they didn't find a niche, and you think you have one, the world just might beat a path to your door  🙂

Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
Need quick confidential answers? $25
Need project assistance? $100/hr.

A. Hi Thilak,

Zinc is the least expensive and most commonly applied of any of the metals. Surely the market is stable, especially as India acquires larger portions of it.

But a stable market for zinc plating will probably be one of the least of your problems. Other issues will be trying to wrangle customers away from their existing suppliers, ever-increasing need for certifications to secure work in different industries, and the fact that a commodity market like simple plain old zinc plating is hard to make money in because it's relatively common and relatively easy.

If you want to flesh out your question further, please do.

Luck & Regards,


Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
Need quick confidential answers? $25
Need project assistance? $100/hr.

A. Hi, Rodel. We have several on-line articles here that may be a start for you, including our: "Understanding Chrome Plating", "Electroplating: How It Works", "Barrel Plating", and "Plating Shops for the New Millennium".

There are a number of good introductory texts listed on our Books Page. One that is both good and very inexpensive is the Garden State Branch AESF "Practical Electroplating" book. Another that can usually be picked inexpensively, because it's an annual, is the Metal Finishing Guidebook.

In the USA all electroplating businesses are "Categorically Regulated". This means all of the waste, even hose water, must be permitted and is considered hazardous even if it's pure enough to drink -- and you are legally responsible for it f-o-r-e-v-e-r, no matter how much you pay to dispose of it. For that reason we urge a thorough investigation before you buy any chemicals ...

To open an electroplating business, if you have never set foot in a plating shop, is a huge leap. We encourage you to pursue your dreams, this industry needs new blood! -- but we suggest that working for a year or two, or for goodness sake at least a summer, in a plating shop is just simple common sense. Good luck!

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Not to mention all the legal battles with local governments and approvals. Very costly. The plating facility is the easy part.

A. Hi Joseph. Our "Understanding Chrome Plating" should give you a quick start.

Anything can be done; and you can certainly go into the chrome plating business! But there's a lot to it: it's costly, and ties you up in incredible environmental red tape from a dozen angles for the rest of your life. Despite electroplating being an industry focused on sustainability -- trying to make metal last 2 or 3 decades instead of it having to be re-mined, re-smelted, re-rolled, re-fabricated, re-finished, re-packaged, re-sold and re-landfilled every 2 or 4 years -- electroplating was the EPA's very first categorically regulated industry anyway.

There are a few directions you could follow. If possible, try to get a summer job or a little longer in a chrome plating shop; you'll be in the perfect place on the learning curve. If that's impossible, under some auspice or other, at least get in to visit several shops, join the American Electroplaters & Surface Finishers Society, and attend the meetings & conferences, and read the journal each month; take a week-long plating course through AESF or Kushner Electroplating School; buy or borrow several plating books and read them cover to cover; subscribe to the industry magazines.

You may already know something about chrome plating; but if you don't, and you try to open a chrome plating shop, and have never even been in one, you start with zero knowledge of absolutely everything. How would you price your product, what medical surveillance would you request for your employees, what emergency procedures would you set up to handle a fire, where would you send your polisher for training, what would you do if a chromic acid tank sprung a leak? How would you clean the floor? What would you adjust if the parts are pitted, or rusting, or whitewashed, or burnt at the corners, or yellowish in the recesses, or if the plating peels off? What records would you keep of your exhaust ventilation system?

Questions like this can be fired off 10 a minute for the next week, and each takes hours to answer. So my advice to aspiring chrome shop owners always remains to get a job in a plating shop for at least a little while. Good luck; we hope you'll join us!

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. We have a Chrome Plating Quickstart on-line here, Shawn, but frankly the best first step is to work in a chrome plating shop for a while if at all possible. You might read a few books from our "must have" list, subscribe to a couple of journals to supplement that book knowledge with news of current events, join the AESF (www.nasf.org), and take a training course in plating from AESF or Kushner Electroplating School. Then see thread 197/26. Good luck!

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. If you were smart you would open a pizza place; if I could go back 15 years and do it again that's what I'd do. If you are hell bent on doing this: before you do anything check your state, city, local and federal laws then check everything else like waste water stuff etc. One thing to know: once you do this every government faction will be in your face and pocket and all personal assets will be at stake even if you are a corporation; you will also be subject to being put in jail if you screw up. Get the BEST lawyer you can find that knows EPA law and to do it the right way it will cost you in the neighborhood of 2,000.000.00. That pizza place is starting to look real good right about now isn't it? It's all cash and if somebody doesn't like your pizza you won't get locked up for it. Good Luck. I wish someone would have told me this 15 years ago.

A. As a first step please see our FAQ: Chrome Plating Tutorial, Shane. Please be ready to invest a lot of time in training and learning, reading books, attending seminars, and taking plating and haz-mat courses. It would be much better to land a job as a chrome plater for a while, so that each "uh-oh" and "I didn't know that" would be on someone else's back instead of putting your own home and life savings on the line every day. But if you are industrious and go out of your way to study at every chance, I suppose it's not impossible to start your own chrome plating business without any actual experience. Good luck.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

? Hi, Dave. Is the plating shop in the general area of Modesto? Local situations and regulations can impact such a decision, and suggestions regarding where to go for help and insight are also geography dependent. California, Oregon, and Washington are very tough areas environmentally both due to political leanings and to earthquakes and the need for a pollution incident prevention plan that will survive them  🙂

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. EPA and the state EPA can make owning a plating shop a disaster. If you buy it, you are now responsible for all of the previous owners problems.
Plating shops are going out of business with alarming regularity, so there must be reasons.
Owning a shop with no knowledge of plating puts you at the mercy of the employees. Not a good idea in most businesses.

A. Hi, Sanjay. Presumably you already know a lot about the electroplating business and your question is what is different about zinc plating ...

Although there are entire books covering just the process information for zinc plating, such as Geduld's "Zinc Plating" [on Amazon, AbeBooks affil links], you probably won't need quite that level of detail. In addition to the previously mentioned resources, see if you can locate a copy of the Electroplating Engineering Handbook ⇦ this on eBay, AbeBooks, or Amazon [affil link] .

The first three technical questions to ask yourself is whether you want to offer rack plating services or barrel plating services, whether you want to go for alkaline zinc plating or acid zinc plating, and whether plain zinc plating is sufficient or you wish to offer an alloy plating like zinc-cobalt, zinc-iron, zinc-nickel, or tin-zinc. I think if you try to do a little research towards answering those 3 questions, you will soon have a pretty fair "book knowledge" of the process of zinc plating.

You will find that zinc plating processes are highly proprietary today and the process vendors will be happy to lay out the process sequence for you. It will probably include as a minimum: soak clean, electroclean, acid activate, zinc plate, trivalent chromate conversion coating, and topcoat -- with rinsing between each step. Good luck!

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

Usually available on eBay; sometimes on AbeBooks or Amazon
(affil links)
free pdf is currently available from academia.edu

A. Hi Siddha. The plating of washers is far more more complicated than the stamping of them, but if you can tell us the exact materials and sizes, and what tumbling or vibratory processes you use, and what the result is in terms of surface finish & freedom or presence of burrs, and what soils, oils and greases might be on the washers, people can probably suggest the first cleaning steps: usually it will be a hot (80 °C) alkaline soak cleaning step followed by hot (80 °C) alkaline electrocleaning. The voltage for the electrocleaning will probably be about 8-10 volts depending on the size of your plating barrels. The amperage for electrocleaning is about 100 ASF (10 ASD), but only a small fraction of the load's surface area is exposed at a given moment in barrel plating so maybe 500-1000 Amps will be consumed while cleaning the contents of a normal production plating barrel designed for washers.

But people don't usually try to make up the process from commodity chemicals, they buy the processes from plating process suppliers who have formulated them to offer the best combination of saponification, wetting, emulsification, de-flocculation, chelating or sequestering, buffering, and inhibition for the specific soils on the specific substrate. They can also run test parts through the plating laboratory and suggest the other steps in the process.

You had posted this on topic 97, a thread about where to get training in plating --so hopefully you are taking that step. Meanwhile I would suggest browsing through every chapter of The Metal Finishing Guidebook.
(if not reading it cover to cover), which will be at least a good first step towards your request for a step-by-step procedure from cleaning to final process. Good luck!

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi Reza. There are consultants who can help you.

You should probably make contact with one of the major plating chemical suppliers and see if they can spend a couple of hours with you providing a proposed process sequence, testing it in the lab, and possibly getting you in to see a zinc plating shop or two.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. "How steep is the learning curve when it comes to plating and estimating. How long should I ask the old owner to stay on board to help transition the business."

Tough questions. There are those of us who have been involved in plating for our entire lifetimes, and are still learning.

You will want to insure that your business includes some "old hand" employees who can keep things moving as you learn. That may include the present owner, and maybe a few of the other employees.

How fast you learn is up to you. There are plenty of text books on the subject, but the hands-on experience is invaluable. Read as much as you can, but you'll also want to spend time on the shop floor, getting your hands dirty, and learning from experienced employees the practical aspects.

You might learn a lot in six months; and you'll never learn it all.

A. Hi. I can't improve on Jeffrey's excellent answer. But a steep learning curve is an excellent thing, and it will be steepest & best when you're interested & committed, when there are knowledgable people around you from whom to learn, and when there's new stuff to learn every minute.

You'll never learn everything the old boss knows, but you'll also start learning stuff about plating that he doesn't know. Speaking for myself I felt it took me about 3 years in my first job before I felt I was actually contributing not just time & effort, but that I had acquired broad enough knowledge to feel I was contributing my fair share of insights. That might be the question you are asking, and that time frame shortens with each job of course; based on the experience you related, I'd tend to think that you could reach that point in a plating shop around your first anniversary if you spend a lot of time out on the floor rather than in the office.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi Ed. The equipment being able to meet current & future laws is one thing, but possible extant contamination of the property is another. Are you completely confident that the shop floor is impervious and always has been?

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Hi again. I am not an expert on this subject, but I believe that when contemplating purchasing a property where regulated chemicals were used and where there is thus a significant possibility of property contamination, an environmental audit is often done. I have also heard that this is often done in two steps, a quick go/no-go audit, followed if necessary by a detailed one with good core samples and all.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey

A. Audit, absolutely. Have it dome by an experienced consultant/firm. What's above ground can maybe be seen, but I would be more concerned by what might be under the floor or in the nearby soil, and that will require sampling and analysis.

I once directed a cleanup at a closed factory which did chrome plating. The plating equipment had been in a concrete pit, the concrete had cracked, and the underlying soil was contaminated.

Over the years the chromium contamination had spread under the floor, unseen and undetected.

We had to break up near 20,000 sq. ft. of floor, excavate and dispose the underlying soil, in some places 8-10 ft down, then back fill and replace the floor.

The final cost was most of a million dollars.

I'm glad to hear you are passing on the shop.

If I wanted to get into the plating business, I would not take over an existing shop if it were free. There are just too many possibilities that past sins may not be knowable, even by the present owner.

A. Hi J. Apologies, but we only address technical issues here because this is a largely anonymous, no registration, aloha & camaraderie site where comparing brands of anything doesn't work (huh? why?) -- so we had to delete those names; sorry.

However, the site is supported by at least 2 suppliers of small systems: Custom Modular Lab Systems [a finishing.com supporting advertiser], and Gold Touch [a finishing.com supporting advertiser]; and other advertisers in our directories can surely help you find, package, or start up small plating systems as well.

Despite the components being right out of the machine shop, your process line will still require an electroclean step and an acid activation step before the plating and conversion coating. It is rare for plating systems to be cookie cutters, usually every one is custom designed even if all the components are standardized.

The usual first step is to meet with a plating process supplier who will plate sample parts for you in their development lab and suggest a treatment cycle. At that point you retain a plating consultant or proceed on your own, perhaps working with one of the equipment suppliers.

Please read the rest of this thread where you will learn that one of the things which differentiates plating from machining is that it is a highly regulated industry because of its wastewater and toxic chemicals. Best of luck.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey