Zinc Plating in Melbourne

[Mick22]

Can anyone recommend a zinc plater in Melbourne?

Isee on another thread guys are paying $20-$50 for plating, I got quoted $200?? what is the general concensus on price?

[LWC82PE]

yeah about $50-$70 is what you will pay for a whole bikes worth of spokes and fasteners and brackets. wiht my plater its just a flat rate cost for up to about 5KG's worth. if you send the parts to them ready to go and all they have to do is dip em through cleaners and then plate them. the $200 price is not right for 'just plating' perhaps that price includes them doing the initial clean as well as , de buring the bolt heads, cleaning up threads and individually wire wheeling each individual part which can take a couple hours to do every fastener on the bike. To save money you can do the intial degreasing and getting rid of the worst of the rust etc and then inividually inspect each nut an bolt and clean up the burs with a file or sanding disc or what ever, clean up any minor thread damage and bin the real bad ones that are beyond it and then wire wheel the parts. Then box them all up and send of to the plater. its not labour intensive for them to do the plating and its basically them dipping the stuff in different chemicals. also you can save on costs you you use some thin copper wire and tie together really small parts to avoid them getting lost. Sometimes the platers will do this if you havent done this and they also might add that to the cost.

[Mick22]

thanks LWC, is bead blasting OK to clean the parts up or does it have to be wire wheel? can you see the wire brush marks thru the plating once its done?

[LWC82PE]

No you wont see wire brush marks through the plating, unless you really really pressed hard then maybe, but ive never had that problem and i have prepared fasteners for plating for more bikes than i can even think off (lots)

bead blasting is ok, but you dont have to blast or rip all the plating off. Previously i have beadblasted parts and had them plated but i didnt like the finish and ended up getting them re-done after wire brushing. depening on how bad the rust is or how much gunk has to come out of a hole in a part, i will beadblast them and thenwire wheel it, then send the part for plating. If you dont have a bench grinder with a wire wheel, you can mount a drill sidways in a vise with a wire brush in it and set the drill on automatic and then wire brush the parts. you can also mount screws in the chuck and use files to remove little burs. obviously if you had a lathe then you would use that. Depending on the part and if its not replaceable i have filled in holes and repaired parts using bronze filler rod and then get them plated. the zinc goes over the bronze filler fine.

its not 100% esential that every part is wire brushed to a semi shiny finish. it will depend on how bad your parts are and how old. I always find though that the cleaner i send the parts to the plater and the more time i put into them the better they come back when plated.

eg they will strip them hyrochloric acidbut they wont check things like insides of threads to see there no bit of black 'gunk' still stuck in there. So i always get rid of that stuff first so the parts are really clean to start up with for the platers.

if you really want to do things good it does help to strip the old plating off some parts yourself, that may require some weld repairs or have hard or difficult to reach places that a wire wheel or beadblaster cant get to and it gives you peace of mind thats its clean. To strip the zinc, just dip the part in hyrochloric acid (no its not battery acid) its used for things like cleaning bricks. the hardware store has it. depening on the part it will usually just take just a couple minutes for the plating to come off. you will see it fizzing.

also make sure you only send off steel or brass parts. Alloy parts wont plate and often you will not get them back and they will disolve in the solution

dont be surprised if a part comes back half plated. This is an error. Not all platers will have the time to sift through every little nut an bolt to inspect them to see they have plated correctly but usually they will re-do a part that they have managed to find before sending your parts back.

with the plater i use, once ive inspected each part, if i find a dud plate job i send the part/s back to them and they re-do it again free of charge.