Plating Thickness Uniformity Comparison
An SFT customer was plating a formed copper part. This part could not be plated on a barrel line, as it was subject to damage from tumbling. On their rack line, the customer got large variations in plating thickness, so that they had to plate to a nominal thickness of 25 uM to get an acceptable percentage of parts which met their minimum thickness specification of 4 uM. All of the parts had to be inspected for minimum thickness.
After installation of the new SFT MP300 plating line, they were able to reduce nominal thickness to 6 uM and still achieve a virtually zero reject rate. Their automotive customer has now qualified this line for spot-checking of samples from each day's production instead of 100% inspection of the finished parts.
This chart shows the variation in thickness two groups of 50 parts, one from the rack line and one from the SFT machine:
