In a very real sense plating baths, cleaning, pickling, and other solutions are the life's blood of our industry. Yet for most of the last nearly 40 odd years that I've spent in the industry additions to these baths were made on a haphazard, essentially uncontrolled basis. This has, in all likelihood, been true since Volta invented the wet cell and, thus, the plating industry. In the bad old days additions were most commonly made when the plater decided the parts didn't quite look right. A few shops today still use the same method, despite its inherent inaccuracies. Some of the materials added to the baths were the "secret" of the individual operator and very closely guarded. No chemical analysis of the baths was ever made. (A few shops still operate this way.)Later, chemical suppliers began offering a service that helped many small operators. The customer or the supplier would collect samples of solutions (at least those containing their proprietary chemicals) and analyze them in the supplier's own laboratories. The results were then passed on to the customer. While this was a great step forward, there were limitations. Unfortunately, when samples are sent out for analysis, conditions change between the time the samples are taken and the time the results are reported so as to be in many cases nearly useless. It was often a matter of a week or more between the time the sample was taken and the time results were available. Samples were also sometimes lost or misidentified, which delayed the process even more.
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