Nickel plating is another popular electroplating service used in the engineering, automobile, and electronics industries. The uses of nickel plating vary depending on the type of nickel. In general, the metal is valuable for its hardness, lubricity, resistance to wear, and magnetic attributes.
In addition, while using nickel sulfa-mate by itself, it is also an under-plate for other metals. This under-plate creates a diffusion barrier, blocking the base metal from entering other layers of the finish.
Nickel plating, however has a wide variety of purposes due to the decorative yet practical qualities that it possesses.
There are 3 types of standard finishes for nickel plating:
- Bright Nickel: This is generally found in decorations but it is also used to protect objects from corrosion and wear.
- Semi-Bright Nickel: This is still somewhat shiny, but it has one benefit that bright nickel doesn’t have. Bright nickel loses its ductile quality therefore bending or manipulating the object would be extremely difficult. The Semi-Bright nickel retains it’s flexible quality.
- Nickel Chloride: This is a very dull nickel. It is usually found as an undercoating, which works well at keeping anything on the plated object from leaking through to the final plate.
The two biggest benefits of using nickel as commercial plating are:
- Nickel plating protects against corrosion because it encases the metal object leaving no place for anything that could get in and ruin the underlying material.
- Nickel plating resists wear. This makes it an excellent choice to be used for equipment that gets a lot of use or equipment that has pieces that rub up against each other. It extends the life of the equipment and saves you money in the long run.
When you need an item plated in nickel, gold, silver, tin, or copper, look to American Plating Company. With 70 years of professional plating experience, we have a proven track record of delivering high quality craftsmanship that you can depend on. Not every nickel plating company is the same – we’ll take the time to make sure your order exceeds your expectations no matter what!
Also see: Electroless nickel plating (EN)