Finding the best-rated metal plating services can be a challenge. With the number of plating shops in the United States, the ones with the most experience and highest quality are few and far between. Some plating shops may offer basic plating finishes while shying away from the more costly finishes like rhodium and gold plating. Likewise, many are unwilling to implement more complex plating methods like selective plating or specific engineered plating solutions for a customer’s critical and unique requests.
The custom plating techniques used in metal plating range from very standard techniques, such as rack and barrel plating, to more complex techniques like plating on micro parts using tiny Shot and selective plating. Usually, the difficult techniques are used on particular applications where the customer cannot have plating on a specific area of the part. These areas can sometimes include threads or blind holes in basic selective plating. In more complex selective plating, the areas can include plating only on one side of the part or only in one selected area like the edge of the part. Deciding which plating company can do complex plating techniques separates standard plating shops from the best-rated ones.
Our Masking Capabilities for Tight Tolerances
Liquid masking is typically used for awkwardly shaped parts that need to be masked. ProPlate® has a green and orange masking that allows employees to apply the liquid masking onto the part, allow time to cure, process through the plating process, then peel the dried maskant off to remove. Likewise, liquid masking is used for selective plating on parts with very tight tolerances. Secondly, heat shrink shrinks around the part and keeps a tight seal to keep chemistry away from the part/product. It typically comes in different colors, shapes, and sizes. Thirdly, tape is used for large patches of flat surface. Also, the green Polyester tape is used for large patches of surface area. It is easy to cut to fit different shapes and sizes.
Caps are another example of masking used at ProPlate®. Caps are put at the ends of screws and holes to cover them during the plating process. These can come in any shape and size for different types of screws. Finally, screws are commonly used for keeping plating out of a threaded hole. Screws are made to fill in various sized threaded holes where a screw will go after plating. Customers often do not want to electroplate inside threaded holes. ProPlate® has many different-sized screws to fill in threaded holes, including plastic screws that offer a tighter fit to keep all chemistry out of the hole. These types of masking are used to plate a part per the customers’ request selectively. On more complex selective plating, a combination of these types of masking is often used.
Gold Plating Capabilities
ProPlate® is primarily a precious metal plating shop. By and large, this distinction separates ProPlate® from other plating shops and puts us among the best-rated metal plating services. We specialize in Gold plating, Rhodium plating, Platinum plating, and Palladium plating. We are also a medically approved supplier, meaning we are qualified to plate on medical devices.
ProPlate® meets all the requirements for our quality management through ISO 13485:2016. Likewise, this approval is a significant determining factor in why ProPlate® is chosen for their precious metal plating requests. We have two types of Gold plating at ProPlate®, hard and soft Gold. The specification is MIL-G-45204. Type 1 and Type II Gold deposits are harder and are alloyed with either Cobalt or Nickel as deposited. These alloys have a much higher hardness and are more appropriate for contacts and connectors. Type III Gold (99.9% gold is usually called “pure”) is used in the semiconductor industry when parts need to be wire bonded during fabrication.
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