and his plating crew.
"Excellent adhesion and no blisters," Olander says. He adds that
E-Brite Ultra Cu also eliminates
the dangers and extensive costs
of using hazardous cyanide in the
workplace, which are two reasons
American Standard decided not to
use cyanide in its North American
operations. In addition, E-Brite
serves as both a strike and a plate
bath, and it has lower copper
concentration, which means less
sludge generation, he says.
"It has a finer grain than cyanide
copper, which increases the density
of the deposit," Olander says.
After testing out E-Brite Ultra
Cu on American Standard parts
in the lab, EPi's next step was to
go back to Mexico and charge
American Standard's pilot copper
tank with the alkaline, no-cyanide
copper plating process and EPi's
pretreatment process.
"The first rack came out beautiful with no blisters," Carraza says.
"We were very happy to see that.
And it was much faster."
Deep-Recess plating
Carraza even cut one of the
copper-plated parts in half and
measured the copper thickness
to find that he was, in fact, getting the 6 - 7 microns promised
in the deepest recessed areas after
just 20 minutes. He and his team
then started running production
through the pilot line, which
meant installing E-Brite Ultra Cu
and EPI's pretreatment process
throughout the entire system.
"At first, there were some challenges because of the existing line
american standard decided not to use cyanide-based copper plating processes
in north america when work was reshored.
We had to find a better solution, and we had to speed up
the plating process."
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