CEP, Commercial Electro Plating, founded in 1956 by a husband and wife team, has been expanding and growing its metal plating business since its founding. Company services started with zinc rack and barrel plating for both large and small parts, and has since expanded into electropolishing, passivation, electroless nickel, bright nickel, chem film and zinc phosphate, masking, and selective plating.
Through the 1960s into the 1980s, Commercial Electro Plating continued to grow to its current size and location in Fresno, California. In the 1980s, long time foreman Fred Rendon and his son Dave started running the business. CEP employs 12 people in its 17,000-square-foot factory.
“Commercial Electro Plating provides zinc rack and barrel plating services which apply the highest quality durable finishes to your steel, brass, and copper parts. Zinc plating is a proven process used to combat corrosion and rust while also providing an attractive finish. Our processing lines are designed to deliver consistent results to both low and high volume production runs,” the company website said. It plates steel, brass and copper with zinc. The rack length is up to 156-inch, while the width is up to 30-inch and the height is up to 48-inch. Typical lead time is two to three days with rush service available. Volume is anywhere from prototypes to full production runs.
Commercial Electro Plating added the heat exchanger plate cleaning process in 1922 because of increasing demand from customers in agriculture, automotive, and industry, who needed to clean debris from stainless steel or titanium heat exchangers. CEP uses a dip process and pressure washing, as needed to clean the heat exchanger plates. The plates can weight up to 1,000 pounds. Lead time is two to three days with rush service available.
“Stainless steel electropolishing or also known as chemical polishing is a controlled removal process that imparts a highly reflective finish on stainless steel alloys. This process removes free iron that is embedded into the surface from the manufacturing processes compared to normal passivation processes that can only remove surface contaminants. Electropolishing can also diminish scratches, burrs, sharp edges, heat tint, and oxide scale,” the website said. This service is used by dairy, agriculture, medical, aerospace, power transmission/distribution, water sanitation and petrol chemical.
Another Commercial Electro Plating process is masking, or selective plating, an added value service. This process allows the customer to pick a place on a part where the customer wants to prevent plating due to critical tolerances or for other reasons, yet plate the rest of the part. One example is external threads, which are often masked in heavier deposit plating to prevent the oversizing of the threads. A customer may want to mask a blind hole to prevent entrapping plating fluid. A customer may mask a section of a part that will be welded post plate, the website said.
Commercial Electro Plating also offers the chem film or Alodine conversion coating used to protect aluminum from corrosion. It also helps adhere paint to aluminum and leaves the aluminum unchanged. In addition to protecting against corrosion it protects aluminum against the loss of electrical conductivity.