Why This Step Gets Subcontracted
Plating is capital intensive, chemically demanding and environmentally regulated. It is the first operation a small moulding shop sends outside. That is why so many shower heads in the market are moulded in one place and plated in another, and why finish complaints so often have no clear owner.
Our own about page lists electricity plating as one of the in-house facilities alongside mould making, plastic injection, mould maintenance, testing and quality control, and assembling and packing. When a finish question comes up, it is answered by the people who ran the bath.
What Plating On Plastic Actually Involves
This section is general process explanation rather than a description of any specific line. Plating on ABS is not the same as plating on metal. The plastic has to be made conductive first, which means the surface is chemically etched to open up the butadiene phase, then activated, then given a first conductive layer before the normal metal deposition can begin. Each of those steps is a place where a batch can go wrong.
The result of a bad etch is not visible on the day. It shows up weeks or months later as blistering, lifting at an edge, or a cloudy patch where the layer was thin. This is the failure mode buyers describe as the chrome going off.
What A Buyer Can Actually Inspect
- Edges and parting lines, where a thin deposit shows first.
- Inside surfaces and recesses, where throwing power is worst.
- Colour consistency between parts in the same carton, not just against the sample.
- Adhesion after a thermal cycle, which is where a poor etch reveals itself.
Why A Matched Set Is A Plating Question
A shower set has a handset, a fixed head, a bar or rail, a hose nut and a bracket. If those parts are plated in different shops the chrome tones differ, and the difference is visible in a bathroom even when each part passes on its own. Because we plate the whole shower programme on one line, a set matches out of the carton. That is the single most practical reason to consolidate a shower set onto one supplier.
How This Sits In Our Quality Flow
Our published quality process covers inspection of incoming materials with resin certifications kept on file, a new part qualification path that can include first article inspection, a process capability study, pre-production runs, PPAP and ECN release after customer approval, and verification through the production cycle by dimensional functional and destructive tests. Plated parts are checked inside that flow rather than beside it.
