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.

Mike Petrey is Plant Manager at powder coater Prism Technologies in Redford, Michigan, which was founded in 1997 as a small family company with two employees and 2,500 square feet.

The founder, Eric Felton Sr., had a history with powder manufacturing and quality control with Glidden paints. He branched into consulting and assisted in powder line set-ups and troubleshooting all over the country, Petrey says.

Today, his son, Eric Jr., owns the facility with six spray booths, one conveyor line, three batch ovens, and one line oven. Most of their work is in the automotive industry, with parts such as material handling racks for several fabricators.

Read the article at https://finishingandcoating.com/index.php/powder-coat/2284-prism-technologies-grows-powder-coating-operation-through-quality-turnaround-time

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