
Please tell us WHO you are, WHAT you do, & WHY you want to know!

Remember that you're asking people to spend their time helping you!
They're far more likely to try to help a real person work through their problems than to publicly compete against AI agents about generalities 🙂
Abstract Questions are easily misunderstood and usually boring. So, pretty please, with sugar on it—
- Spend time on your question. Tell us whether you're a 3rd grader or post‐doc, a hobbyist or a pro, working on a watch dial or a Winnebago, doing one for yourself or millions in a factory, a new process not yet successful, or something you've done for years that went south. When potential helpers can't even start except by composing a long list of "ifs-ands-&-buts", very few will.
- Not "What will happen if?", but what are you actually experiencing?
- Tell us something we don't know! Say "my formula of so & so gives such‐&‐such a problem", not "I want the best formula".
- Interesting questions get answered! Say "I have a brass trunk from an ancestor's sea voyage …", not "How do I clean brass?". Say "I need the lugs nuts from my '55 Chevy BelAir show car chrome plated", not "What shops do chrome?".
- Include a photo/sketch of the situation if you can.
- A pic of yourself encourages responses by personalizing things.
- Hurried postings must be set aside for editing — but the forum is 'last in, first out', so they'll often get buried under newer mail.
- Anonymity is totally incompatible with camaraderie! Since 1989, an aim of this forum has been to be a place of camaraderie & warm aloha for anyone interested in metal finishing. Apologies, but when we're busy we focus on flesh & blood people and their problems, so postings with missing/fictitious names are sometimes discarded.
If your company doesn't allow public postings, feel free to anonymously read everything here ... but please retain a consultant for confidential help.
Don't poison the well of civil discourse on behalf a company neither willing to share anything themselves nor willing to pay for confidential help :-)