Plating Small Parts – Barrel Plating

Plating Small Parts

Electro plating small parts (tiny parts) using traditional rack or wire methods can be time-consuming, and therefore quite costly. Barrel Plating technologies make the process of plating small parts far more cost effective.The barrel has mesh sides which allow the flow of solution through the barrel, plus over and between all parts. The barrel is placed in the electrolyte solution and rotated through the solution, tumbling the parts continuously throughout the plating cycle. Because electroplating requires contact between an anode (a block or bar of the desired metal) and the item to be plated, ordinarily metal racking or wires are used to enable the current flow.  However, in barrel plating, part contact is maintained by the parts continually contacting each other, as they are tumbled through the solution. Barrel plating is only effective when there are sufficient numbers of parts in the barrel to maintain contact with the anode.

Our barrel plating plant is commonly used for plating tin, nickel and silver finishes.  Typically these involve items like small electrical and electronic components, connectors, small nuts, bolts, screws, washers as well as other small hardware items.

Benefits of Barrel Plating

Barrel plating small parts, is a solution to an otherwise very tedious job (e.g. racking or wiring each small part). In large enough quantities, this plating method is very cost effective. There are lower labour costs because parts do not need to be individually racked or wired to achieve electrical contact.

It is advisable to obtain technical advice from our electroplating team to ensure best possible quality outcomes when your specs call for plating of very small metal items, that are not feasible to manually rack-up, or wire-up, for processing.