About Finishing.com

A New Chapter

I am honored to help carry Finishing.com forward. This site has a rich history, and my goal is to build on that history with a little Texas flair: keep it practical, keep it friendly, and make it even more useful for the people doing real work in plating shops, anodizing shops, job shops, captive shops, labs, classrooms, garages, and anywhere else folks are trying to solve a finishing problem.

The new forum does require registration. It is more powerful and more open than the old hand-curated system, so we need a few modern guardrails. The goal, though, has not changed. We still want this place to feel helpful, civilized, positive, and fun. Please bring your questions, answers, stories, corrections, and strong opinions, but bring them with the same respect you would show if we were all standing around the same shop floor.

Preserving What Matters

We have done our best to preserve the legacy content of the site and make it easier to search. That history matters. Finishing.com has collected decades of practical questions, hard-earned answers, shop stories, warnings, experiments, and explanations from people who cared enough to share what they knew.

It is important to honor the people who built that knowledge base, especially Ted Mooney. Ted helped create a place where people could ask real questions and get thoughtful help from people who had been there before. That spirit is worth protecting.

Where We Are Headed

At the same time, Finishing.com cannot just be a museum. We are going to keep growing the site with more in-depth research articles, more industry news, better navigation, and more ways to learn from the experience already collected here.

We will use AI to help manage the site and provide value for users, but the real treasure will always be people with hard-won knowledge who are willing to share what they have learned. I especially want to hear from experts with real, on-the-floor experience in plating, anodizing, finishing, job shops, captive shops, and related manufacturing work. Specs and theory matter, but stories from the line are often how the rest of us finally understand what is really going on.

What You Will Find Here

• The legacy finishing Hotline, with public questions and answers going back to the early days of the web.
• A technical library and FAQs covering metal finishing, surface finishing, corrosion, plating, anodizing, polishing, powder coating, and related topics.
• Preserved historical discussions from industry contributors, including many people whose practical knowledge deserves to remain available.
• New articles, research, and industry updates as we continue building the next version of the site.

A Bit of History

Finishing.com has been continuously online since February 1989, starting as a dial-up bulletin board system. Extracts from the Hotline were printed monthly in Metal Finishing magazine as the “Heard On the Hotline” column for more than 10 years. When the web became publicly accessible, Finishing.com became one of the first online services for the finishing industry.

In May of 1995, Ted Mooney and Tom Pullizzi incorporated Finishing.com. In 2003, the American Electroplaters and Surface Finishers Society honored Ted with its Industrial Achievement Award for the establishment of Finishing.com.

We will keep preserving that history while making the site more useful for the people who need it now.