The Finish Line

Ken Hoffmann was enjoying his life in luxurious Palm Springs, California when the call came that made him take a more serious tone about his life goals. He had worked in the construction business, in the restaurant industry, and even was a sommelier for a time in the glitzy Coachella Valley of California. Life was easy and fun more than 30 years ago for the married father of two.

“I was moving along fine in my life, and my wife called me one day telling me she was pregnant,” Hoffmann recalls. “I can remember it like it was yesterday. I had to really find a business, and I talked to a guy who was a commercial realtor, and he turned me onto a plating shop.”

Of course, Hoffmann knew absolutely nothing about the finishing industry.

Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1667-palm-springs-plating-looking-forward-to-trivalent-transition

Loreto “Larry” Capoccia came to the U.S. from Italy with his wife in 1966 and soon found a career in the metal finishing industry. He began working at Alexandria Metal Finishers and eventually became part owner of the company, specializing in precious metal plating (gold, silver, and rhodium), hard anodizing, and multi-plating on unusual alloys and special set-ups.

AMF is now a Nadcap-certified facility that offers more than 40 processes, including non-destructive testing, and they also maintain an in-house library of federal, aerospace, military, and commercial standards.

Read more about Larry at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1518-legends-larry-capoccia-alexandria-metal-finishers

Dan Brockman was a college student in the late 1960s when he took a part-time job at a manufacturer who also happened to be looking for a hard chrome plater.

One of the tasks Brockman was given was to find a suitable plating operation for his employer to use, and he discovered there were not many platers to choose from.

“I went back to my college class and wrote a 70-page business plan with a few other students on how to run a hard chrome plating business,” says Brockman, who eventually used the plan to open what is now Techmetals in Dayton, one of the premier finishing operations in North America.

“I was 20 years old and thought I knew it all,” he says. “I started the business and never even went back and finished college. My first plating tank was a Rubbermaid trash bin, and we used a car battery charger as a power source. I thought I could easily fix this problem. 

Today, Brockman is mostly retired but still visits Techmetals offices frequently, where his son, Phillip, is now president and CEO.

“Phillip has continued a lot of the things that we started, which was continued training for employees and showing appreciation to the staff,” Brockman says. “You are only as good as your employees.”

TJ Grandcolas is owner of Reid Metal Finishing in Santa Ana, California, a shop that was started by his father, Jerry.

Grandcolas tells how he worked in the shop after college, and then become principal owner after his father's passing in 2018 when TJ was just 33.

“At 33 years old. I was not prepared for all that happened,” he says. “I didn’t really feel like he had a lot of time to teach me and get me ready to take over the business. I learned a lot, and it was definitely a trial by fire, but I wasn’t going to let him down, and I wasn’t going let the team down here.”

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We talk with Chris Trimino, Vice President of Operations at Sav-On Plating in Phoenix, Arizona, about how, if a part is made in the U.S. and headed to Mexico to be assembled, then Sav-On Plating seeks to be a stop on the way.

“We want a piece of it,” Chris says. “We offer a plating service, final quality, final packaging, and direct delivery to their customer for assembly in Mexico.”

It has been that way since 1992, when Trimino’s father, Joseph, opened the Phoenix location with his sister, JoAnn, after their father began serving the Southern California area in 1969. Eventually, Joseph and Chris closed the Paramount location, and Joseph bought out his sister and kept the Arizona facility open and growing.

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1339-arizona-s-sav-on-plating-adds-lines-as-last-stop-before-border

When John Lindstedt entered the Navy several decades ago, he was selected for the Nuclear Propulsion Program to support the submarine program.

That meant classes 8 hours a day straight for six months, with multiple exams in between to weed out those who weren’t cut out for the stringent engineering requirements.

“I’m told it’s the equivalent of a master’s degree in seven months,” says Lindstedt, who left the Navy in 1974 to return to Milwaukee to work for his father at what was then known as Artistic Plating.

Renamed Advanced Plating Technologies, Lindstedt is retired and has his two sons running the operations: Matt is President of the company, and James is Vice President and Engineering Manager.

Read the article about John here: https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1497-legends-john-lindstedt-advanced-plating-technologies

Silver has long been the metal of choice in finishing electronic components, and the surge of electric vehicles has put silver at the forefront of the automotive industry.

But Rich DePoto, Business Development Manager with Uyemura International, says in this TechTalk with www.FinishingAndCoating.com that with the emergence of EV units, “all of the rules for automobiles have changed, and for silver.”

That’s why DePoto and the Uyemura team have been rolling out the development of its new Arguna platform of chemistry, which he says is intended to address all of the new demands for existing and future electronic vehicles.

“Things have changed,” DePoto says. “There are four areas that have really been changed, and No. 1 is that voltages have gone from 12 to 24 to 1,000 volts.”

Secondly, Depoto says temperatures — which were around 80°C max and often under the hood and easy to protect in an electric vehicle — in sealed components such as powertrains now all get to 150°C.

“That is dramatic,” says Depoto, who adds that electromigration under those operating temperatures can become an issue, as silver is susceptible to dendritic growth and shorting

Lastly is moisture in some of the components. He says in the past, some moisture could be tolerated, but not with the higher voltages, temperatures, and electromigration under all of those conditions.

“Silver needs to change,” DePoto says. “It needs to be as silver on steroids.”

We talk with Ralph Capalbo Jr. from New Method Plating in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Capalbo worked for almost 60 years in a company started by his father.

“I’ve tried to run a successful business for the last 57 years, so now I am glad that the boys are in there now,” says Capalbo, who turned the business over to his sons, Nick and Chris.

New Method offers many plating processes, including cadmium, which not many shops offer these days. Capalboadmits it is harder to run a plating operation these days because of the more stringent government regulations.

We talk with Eric Svenson Sr., president of Plating Resources, about the development of a new and safe way to add sulfate to hexavalent chrome plating baths, Buffered Sulfate Adjuster.

The product can be used for both hard and decorative plating, either when making up a new solution or when raising the sulfate level in an existing bath. Traditionally the sulfate has been increased using hazardous concentrated sulfuric acid.

Visit www.plating.com for additional information.

We spoke with Dan Rose, owner of Elite Metal Finishing in Oceanside CA, about the job coaching he has received from Jim Castigilia from Business Street Fighter Consulting.

You can read the article here: https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1332-executive-coaching-helps-finishing-owners-handle-day-to-day 

“I’m a real passionate guy, and when talking to my staff, sometimes it comes out as a little bit of a temper,” says Rose, president of the company he founded in 2001. “I had to really learn to say, ‘Okay, look, just take it easy.’“

It was his interactions with his employees — many of whom were starting to see Rose becoming stressed running a finishing operation — that caused him several years ago to seek out a job coach to him manage not just his company but also himself.

“My business started to grow beyond my level of expertise,” Rose says. “I felt extremely overwhelmed.”