The Finish Line

To say the last three years have been a rollercoaster for Jessica Famiglietti Young would be quite an understatement. Before 2019, she was a successful real estate agent in Las Vegas and owned a local armory that manufactured and sold firearms.

Today, she owns an anodizing facility in North Las Vegas that offers Type II and Type III finishes for a wide variety of customers but also serves as the in-house line for her New Frontier Armory company. The shop opened in 2020 with new equipment and a fully closed-loop recycling system that reuses all of their rinse waters through a DI water treatment system feeding back into their tanks. 

What has happened in the past several years has been something that Young never anticipated would occur, which included losing the love of her life and the father to her two young children, starting a new finishing operation that had been in the works, and finding love again as she works day and night to keep her businesses running and growing.

“It helps to have a good nanny,” Young says. “But I truly had no choice in what has happened to me since 2019. Then it was sink or swim for my family and me. I decided to swim.”

Go here to read the article we wrote on VMF: https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/anodizing/1097-brighter-lights-ahead-for-vegas-metal-finishing-owner

Starting on the supplier side of the finishing industry, Adam Anderson has always wanted to try his hand at running an electroplating shop of his own.

Having worked with dozens of plating shops during his time at Columbia Chemical and Atotech, Anderson had seen some fantastic ways that plating shops could be run efficiently and thought he could incorporate some of those when his time came if it ever did.

So, when Anderson got the call to help transform a former plating company in Medina, Ohio, it wasn't exactly what he expected. Systems needed major repair, contaminated baths in the tanks needed replacing including several tanks, generated waste was prevalent almost everywhere he looked, and he needed to work on new permitting for wastewater treatment before they could rack their first parts.

Suffice to say, the first few months after Anderson was named president of Miller Plating in 2020, it was similar to the old adage of trying to take a drink from a fire hose.

"It still feels that way today," says Anderson. "It doesn't seem to stop coming at you at times. Nothing has slowed down for us."

Read the full article and see the video at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1047-miller-plating-time-with-new-owners-and-shop-refresh

In this edition of our "Legends" series, we chat with Valley Chrome's Ray Lucas, who  has served the metal finishing industry in many ways over the last 50 years. 

It was Lucas and almost two dozen other metal finishing leaders who helped unit five distinct association groups to form what is now the National Association for Surface Finishing (NASF), the leading trade association for the electroplating and surface finishing industry. It was a wild time in the unification meetings in the early 2000s, and Lucas was a vocal advocate for the metal finishers who were joining with the industry supplies and other trade groups to form the NASF.

Valley Chrome pivoted to becoming more of a manufacturer than just an electroplater. In 2006, they acquired Wingmaster, a respected company that built high-quality stainless steel turbo wings for pickups and trucks. Valley Chrome has now developed an extensive line of stainless steel truck accessories including visors, cab and sleeper panels, window trim, light panels, tool boxes fairings, and more. It's enough to fill a 250-plus page catalog that consumers can buy products made and manufactured at Valley Chrome’s Clovis, CA headquarters.

Read the full article and see the video at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/1072-legends-ray-lucas-valley-chrome