The Finish Line

Alan Henry is the owner of ChromeTech of Wisconsin, an ISO-certified industrial plating operation that he founded in 1984. The company specializes in hard chrome, sulfamate nickel, electroless nickel, and nickel-chrome plating.

The ChromeTech company is indeed a family affair; in addition to Alan, his wife, Vickie, and son, Zach, work there, and sister Adrianna also helped with marketing, writing, and photography throughout her high school and college years and even now.

A decade ago, they added a 22,000-square-foot addition to their facility, bringing it to 44,000 square feet. They have about 28 employees and run three shifts, six manual lines, and one automated line for EN.

For their hard chrome process, ChromeTech has a large automated line with four cells that can run up to 17 million parts a year and has over 3,000 recipes. They also have manual hard chrome lines.

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2223-brotherly-love-chrometech-picking-up-the-pieces-after-family-tragedy

Jesse Heines of Digger Specialties is the Corporate Powder Coating and Project Manager for the railing, fencing, and column manufacturer with various locations around the U.S. 

Loren “Digger” Graber founded his outdoor living and maintenance-free products in 1984, starting as a manufacturer of vinyl fencing and various other related maintenance-free products. Under his leadership, DSI has become one of North America's leading aluminum railing manufacturers for decks and porches.

The company specializes in railing systems, screen rail (screen room enclosures), fencing, gates, columns, and outdoor lighting. Most of its products can be found at lumber yards, specialty building products locations, and retail stores such as Home Depot.  

The company has five locations and has powder coating operations in three of them: Bremen, Indiana, which is also the corporate Offices; Valdosta, Georgia; Randleman, North Carolina; Carthage, Missouri; and Montgomery, Pennsylvania.

For Heines, it was paramount to ensure that the powder coating lines were identical in the Indiana, Missouri, and Pennsylvania facilities, especially since the company offers a lifetime limited warranty on its products.

Ross Peterson is the Chief Business Development Officer of ProPlate, an Anoka, Minnesota, company that finishes specialty items for the medical and surgical industry. 

In this podcast, Ross explains how ProPlate works closely with the medical community to come up with new finishes and coatings for critical medical parts.

For example, ProPlate spent over a year developing a process to finish neodymium iron boron magnets, which can be up to 10 times stronger than the best ceramic magnets. Surgeons were hoping to implant some of the NdFeB magnets into newborns to help them with serious medical conditions that risked their ability to survive.

Due to the base magnet material's porosity and the magnets' reactivity to acidic and basic chemistries, ProPlate faced a difficult challenge in designing a plating process for the magnets. Still, after a long R&D process, they met the requirements.

Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2118-proplate-motivated-by-success-of-lifesaving-medical-coatings

Navin Mangrue is Sales Manager for Professional Powder Coating located in Etobicoke, Ontario, a family-run shop in Toronto that is ready to coat anything that might need to survive in treacherous climate.

“About 99% of what we powder coat is going to be sitting outside all day and all night and for years to come,” says Navin Mangrue, Sales Manager for Professional Powder Coating located in Etobicoke, Ontario. “So we are catering to rust, we're catering to blasting, and we're catering to galvanize. We know what these products are going to have to go through.”

That’s one reason that Professional Powder Coating has invested heavily in an in-house laboratory where they subject their coatings to comprehensive testing, which includes conformity to ASTM standards, AAMA requirements, and other demanding testing protocols.

Professional Powder Coating believes they will stay busy for years to come in certain industries like architecture — especially with the way housing starts and infrastructure keeps climbing.

And a commitment to quality will lead the company as they continue to grow.

“I strongly believe that if you put quality first in everything you do, then chances are your customer would pay the price,” Mangrue says. “If it's a railing and you're dealing with a large project in this area of expertise and powder coating, it takes educated people to tell them, ‘Let's use this product because it will fail otherwise. It has to be about quality.”

Visit https://www.professionalpowdercoating.ca

New England Electropolishing owners Amy Prigmore and Luke Almeida discussed how their company in Fall River, Massachusetts, has evolved since their parents founded it in 1985.

Alvin and Jeannine Almeida founded NEE and slowly grew the business over the next several decades. Al Almeida kept his day job distributing chemicals, and NEE had just two employees who performed the work Al brought to them.

Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2049-with-one-focus-new-england-electropolishing-continues-to-shine-after-40-years

We talk with Francisco Capacho, President and General Manager of Dixon Hard Chrome in Sun Valley, California, about his path to success in the United States electroplating industry.

Capacho began his career working at his father’s plating operation near Bogota, Columbia, where he was on the shop floor at age 5 following his father around the complex.

In 2023, he moved to south to Southern California to run Dixon Hard Chrome, which has over 10,000 square feet in the building complex and an additional 23,000 square feet of storage space for parts and orders.

Dixon Hard Chrome—founded by Richard Dixon in 1955—is a Nadcap facility that focuses on aerospace finishing and offers more than just the hard chrome in its name; the shop also specializes in copper plating and electroless nickel, plating on aluminum, cadmium plating, passivation, etching, and magnetic and penetrant inspection.

Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2080-small-aerospace-parts-mean-big-growth-for-dixon-hard-chrome 

Bales Metal Surface Solutions’ owners, Stacey Bales and Sara Mortensen, chose a practical gift for themselves as they prepare for their anniversary in a few years.

In March, the Downers Grove, Illinois, company christened a pair of new nickel lines at its 29,000-square-foot facility, doubling its capacity to reduce customer lead time by half and grow the business even more.

“We’re hoping our 50th year in business is going to be a bang-out one,” says Stacey, whose late father started the company with his brother in 1978, giving them four years to meet some pretty big sales goals they have set for the shop.

Check out the podcast where Stacey tells about how they are preparing themselves for growth in the coming years.

You can also read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2002-new-plating-lines-at-bales-metal-surface-solutions-celebrates-approaching-milestone

When Chuck Zinke built his second finishing and coating operation over 100 miles away from the first, he quickly added a new word to his vocabulary.

“Delegation,” says Zinke, who started Perfection Industrial Finishing in Tucson, Arizona, in 1995 and added a second plant in 2020 in Chandler, about a 75-minute drive north near Phoenix.

The expansion was necessary for Perfection, which offers powder coating, ceramic coating, liquid coating, and chemical conversion processes at both locations.

Read more about Chuck and his shops at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/liquid-coat/1990-aiming-high-perfection-industrial-finishings-second-az-location-speeds-growth

We talk with Matt Fodge, the Vice President at Gleco Plating, and his dad, Jeff Fodge, President, which has two locations in Texas in Rowlett and McAllen.

Gleco provides zinc, anodize, chromate, bright nickel, tin, silver, gold, and copper finishes to the automotive, defense, sheet metal, metal machining, and telecommunications industries.

Jeff says about three years ago, Gleco decided to put a new management operating system in place that “caused all of us to think outside the box” as the company began to diversify its customer base even more and also look at how to attract the type of customers that would be a better fit for them, as well as return better margins.

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1973-gleco-plating-adopts-less-is-more-approach-to-attract-customers

The markets that Melissa Ver Meer’s companies service could not be more varied, from screen printing to commercial food equipment to ovens and dryers for industrial manufacturing.

However, one consistent feature of the various markets that HIX Corporation sells to is that Ver Meer knows she must have an extremely durable coating applied to all the machines, parts, and components.

It’s a lesson that Ver Meer—who has a Doctorate in Materials Science from Iowa State—learned when she started her career in the oil and gas industry. As the Owner and CEO of HIX, she has carried this lesson forward.

“I started in the control valve world, so material selection and finishes were important because they were in a lot of heavy industrial applications,” she says. “It was anything from power plants to pulp and paper mills to chemical operations; it was just a variety of whatever you could throw at it. We were trying to keep the control valve running, which was similar in the oil fields. You're just trying to get things to survive in these oil wells.”

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/powder-coat/1964-the-fix-for-hix-switch-to-powder-coating-helps-improve-throughput-quality