Alex Budd was offered a job in metal finishing while completing his MBA six years ago, and he realized it might be his calling.

“I had always been interested in industries that are under the radar that you just don't think about,” says Budd, now the owner of the shop he went to work for, Greensboro Industrial Platers, having bought it six years ago from the woman who hired him. “This was perfect. You don't realize how every metal you see is coated in or treated. And it just fascinated me.”

But if you think owning a plating shop at 24 is daunting, realize that Budd took another monumental leap when he recently acquired crosstown rival United Metal Finishing and merged the two companies.

Expanding his company's services and capacity was at the deal's heart. Read the full article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/plating/2367-acquisition-helps-greensboro-industrial-platers-grow-footprint

We talk with Elite Metal Finishing's Steve Allen about his challenge of getting the Oceanside, California, shop to attain Nadcap accreditation in chemical processing. In the finishing industry, this effort is not for the faint of heart, especially for someone relatively new.

“ I knew this was going to be a huge challenge,” says Allen, who started at Elite in 2022 after working four years at Tech Plate in Orange, California, a company owned by one of his best friend’s father.

The decision was made to pursue Nadcap—National Aerospace and Defense Contractors Accreditation Program—accreditation in 2023. In late 2024, Elite earned the chemical processing certification after many months of blood, sweat, and tears and following rigorous planning steps.

We talked with Joe Zabielski from Ronatec about the new Paladin high-phos electroless nickel chemistry, which the company says offers outstanding corrosion protection and hardness.

Zabielski says Paladin has passed salt spray tests up to 7500 hours and has plated hardness equivalent to mid-phos baths.

“Paladin is a novel high-phosphorus, electroless nickel process developed to address two key issues when using EN as a coating,” he says. “First and foremost, it is highly corrosion resistant. We have measured salt spray performance over 4130 steel panels past 7,500 hours. That is exceptional as a standard high-phosphate is generally known to plate between 500 to 1,000 hours of salt spray resistance.”

We chatted with Dan Zinman from Miles Chemical on various topics about surface finishing.

One topic is product availability that seems to be a big concern for many finishers, as well as just-in-time delivery, removing material from their floor, or an emergency when a tank is down.

We also discussed how shops are asking for more local presence with their suppliers, such as customer service issues, account management, technical support, and customer service lab help.

We had the chance to have an extended talk with Matt Lindstedt, President of Advanced Plating Technology in Milwaukee, about how the 2009 decision to reconfigure how the Milwaukee-based plating company worked with its customers and end OEMs has changed their company.

“Those were hard years because you didn't know if what we were doing was working,” says Lindstedt, who succeeded his father, John, as president of the company. His brother, James, works alongside him as the Vice President of Engineering.

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.