Not every offspring of a surface finishing company owner is destined to follow in their parent’s footsteps, work their way onto the shop floor, and eventually sit in an executive’s chair.

For Ross Henry of ChromeTech in Franklin, Wisconsin, following in those footsteps would have meant unlacing his ice skates and chucking his Bauer stick, but a potential hockey career staved that off for some time.

“I’ve been away from home playing on youth teams in other states since I was a teenager,” says Henry, Vice President of Operations at the company owned by his father and mother, Alan and Vickie Henry.

“I worked in the shop as a kid polishing parts and doing other things that needed to be done, but there seemed to be something else out there for me,” Ross says. “Eventually, I found my way back home.”

We chat with Kandarp Patel, who purchased Somerville Plating in Melrose Park, Illinois in mid-2024

Somerville Plating is a Nadcap-certified operation with over 44 years in the finishing industry.

“We were looking for something in manufacturing, and we realized that a lot of it has been moving around because of the competitive risks of moving it to Mexico and China,” Patel says. “However, plating is a very local business, and it seemed that this business is always needed for the local industry, and there's never a risk of outsourcing that.”

Patel and Shalin Amin purchased the shop from Randy Hauslein, who bought the former E.J. Somerville Co. in Chicago in 1990 and moved it to Melrose Park. Hauslein was the plant manager at the company from 1982 to 1992; before that, he worked with Hausner Hard Chrome.

Hauslein has stayed on as Director of Quality Control, and his wife, Lori Hauslein, remains the Head Of Operations for Somerville Plating as Patel and his business partner, Amin, get to know the business better.

Visit https://www.somervilleplating.com.

Judy Runge’s metallurgical engineer and surface finishing expert career spans almost 40 years in industrial, government, and academic professional settings.

She worked at Northrop’s Defense Systems Division, Taussig Associates, Inc., Saporito Plating, Argonne National Laboratory, and recently retired as a Principal Engineer for Surface Finishing at Apple. Dr. Runge still maintains her consulting company, CompCote International, where she works with OEMs and finishing operations on various processes, product development and failure analysis.

In 2018, she authored The Metallurgy of Anodizing Aluminum, published by Springer Nature, one of the foremost publications on all facets of the anodizing process.

We spoke with Dr. Runge about her career, her work at Northrop and Apple, and her ongoing anodizing consulting work.