Hello Everyone,
I have a vague idea how a part is chromed. I believe it is dipped into a solution and the Chrome is attached to the past via an eked rial current. What I’m having trouble figuring or is how do the take one part, say a piece is trim and only chrome pay of it. Say just the front side, not the back ora chrome step on a larger painted part. Taping of would be difficult and time consuming for mass production. So, how do you chrome a piece odd a part without doing the whole thing?
Chroming only the front side is fairly easy. You dip the part into the solution so that only the front side is immersed in it.
There’s also some kind of paint or lacquer that they can use to mask off areas on the part that they don’t want chromed. I don’t know too much about the details of this.
One way is by masking the area with paint, lacquer, or anything else that is an electrical insulator and won’t be dissolved by the plating solutions.
Another way is to leave the bare areas machined, and then finish the part after the plating. I have done exactly this on some aluminum parts where the bulk was to be anodized, but certain areas needed to be alodined. Anodize is very hard, so there was a lot of wear on the tooling, but it was cheaper than the labor to mask the areas.
chrome plating is a fairly involved process, usually it involves plating on several layers of different kinds of nickel plating before it the part goes into the chromium bath. chrome will only plate onto the prepped metal, so if put a layer of paint or clear lacquer over areas you don’t want plated, it won’t attach.
now, if you’re talking about “chrome” plated plastic parts, those are typically actually coated with aluminum using a vacuum vapor deposition process. In that case, you just cover the areas you don’t want “plated” with a temporary coating of some kind.
Thanks for the replies and one again I apologies for my spelling errors in my OP. I couldn’t find my glasses, so I winged it.