Copper oxidizes and the oxides do not stay on the copper well.

When they come off there is more copper exposed, which in turn oxidizes, and so-on. Also the oxides do not conduct well. This causes poor electrical contact, which then gets hot and increases the oxidation rate. The oxides, because of their poor conductivity, also cause arcing at the electrical contacts, eroding the copper. Tin plating has two main technical advantages: 1. The thin tin oxide film (10-30 nm) forms on the surface of the tin coating could act as a shield, inhibiting further oxidation; and 2. Being a relatively soft metal, tin provides a low constriction resistance.

Chromium and nickel are two different elements, so they have somewhat different properties. Conventional electrolytic nickel plating is decorative, functional, and corrosion resistant but it tarnishes and it is not as hard as chromium. Electroless nickel plating (actually autocatalytic nickel plating) is a glassy nickel-phosphorous coating that is very corrosion resistant and quite hard, and often used on rough-service applications like down-hole applications. Chrome plating may be either a thick layer of chrome (generally known as hard chrome) that offers exceptional hardness,wear-resistance, and oil-holding capability, but limited corrosion resistance; or it may be nickel-chrome (nickel plating followed by a flash of chrome for tarnish resistance and extra corrosion resistance, as is employed on truck bumpers and automotive brightwork).

was almost surely nickel-chromium plated; that is, it was nickel plated then chrome plated, with the chrome being only a few millionths of an inch thick. So if something peeled, it was the nickel plating. But if the job is done right the nickel will not peel. You are correct that nickel plating which is not later chrome plated has a slight yellowish tinge which grows more pronounced with time as the nickel tarnishes.
lthough anything can be done well or poorly, nickel-chrome plating is a special case that can be done really really well or really really bad (see our Chrome Plating FAQs). When done poorly not only does it contribute nothing to corrosion resistance, it actually accelerates corrosion because the

nickel is anodic to the underlying steel and turns it into a sacrificial anode. Defective is not quite the correct word, however, because the item may well have met the plating specification they wrote for it. Crappy would probably be a good word :-)

What is 'Chrome'
Chrome is slang for Chromium, one of the 92 naturally occurring chemical elements. Chrome is a metal, but it is not useful as a solid, pure substance. Things are never made of solid chrome. Rather, when you hear that something is chrome, what is really meant is that there is a thin layer of chrome, a plating of chrome, on the object (the bulk of the object usually being steel, but occasionally aluminum, brass, copper, plastic, or stainless steel). A cause of occasional confusion is the fact that people may tend to describe any shiny finish as "chrome" even when it really has nothing to do with chromium. For example, brightly polished aluminum motorcycle parts, electropolished stainless steel boat rigging, vacuum metallized mylar balloons and helmets, semi-shiny painted wheels, and nickel plated oven racks are sometimes called 'chrome' by the lay person. Indeed it's not always easy to tell real chrome plating from other finishes if the parts are not side by side. When a chrome plated finish sits right next to another bright finish though, the other finish usually won't compare very favorably :-) Chrome plating is more reflective (brighter), bluer (less pale, grayish, or yellowish), and more specular (the reflection is deeper, less distorted, more like a mirror) than other finishes. Put one end of a yardstick against a bright finish, and see how many inches of numbers you can clearly read in the reflection -- you can clearly see the clouds in the sky reflected in chrome plating. And there's a hard to define "glint" to top quality chrome plating that almost nothing else has.

What's the difference between "Chrome Plating", "Chrome Electroplating", "Chrome Dipping", "Chroming", etc.?
Nothing. Chrome is always applied by electroplating, it is never melted onto parts in the fashion of chocolate on strawberries, sprayed on like paint, or applied in any other way than by electroplating. Note the previous paragraph, though, that everything that is somewhat bright is not necessarily real chrome plating.

Is all chrome plating about the same, then?

Not quite. There are two different general applications for chrome plating: "hard chrome plating" (sometimes called 'engineering chrome plating' or 'functional chrome plating') and "nickel-chrome plating" (sometimes called 'decorative chrome plating').

Hard Chrome Plating

Most people would not be very familiar with hard chrome plating. Hard chrome plating is chrome plating that has been applied as a fairly heavy coating (usually measured in thousandths of an inch) for wear resistance, lubricity, oil retention, and other 'wear' purposes. Some examples would be hydraulic cylinder rods, rollers, piston rings, mold surfaces, thread guides, gun bores, etc. 'Hard chrome' is not really harder than other chrome plating, it is called hard chromium because it is thick enough that a hardness measurement can be performed on it, whereas decorative chrome plating is only millionths of an inch thick and will break like an eggshell if a hardness test is conducted, so its hardness can't really be measured directly. Hard chrome plating is almost always applied to items that are made of steel, usually hardened steel. It is metallic in appearance, and can be shiny, but is not necessarily decorative. Hard chrome plating is not a finish that you would want on a wheel or bumper. Hard Chromium Plating, Robert K. Guffie

Hard chrome plated components, courtesy of U.S. Chrome

Corporation of New York There are variations even within hard chrome plating, with some of the coatings optimized to be especially porous for oil retention, others "thin dense chrome", and so on. Many shops who do hard chrome plating do no other kind of plating at all, because their business is designed to serve only engineered, wear-type, needs. If a shop says they do 'hard chrome only', they have no service that most consumers would be interested in.

Decorative Chrome Plating

Decorative chrome plating is sometimes called nickel-chrome plating because it always involves electroplating nickel onto the object before plating the chrome (it sometimes also involves electroplating copper onto the object before the nickel, too). The nickel plating provides the smoothness, much of the corrosion resistance, and most of the reflectivity. The chrome plating is exceptionally thin, measured in millionths of an inch rather than in thousandths. When you look at a decorative chrome plated surface, such as a chrome plated wheel or truck bumper, most of what you are seeing is actually the effects of the nickel plating. The chrome adds a very slightly bluish cast (compared to the slightly yellowish cast of nickel), protects the nickel against tarnish, minimizes scratching, and symbiotically contributes to corrosion resistance. But the point is, without the brilliant leveled nickel undercoating, you would not have a rust-resistant, reflective, decorative surface. By the way, there is no such thing as "decrotif chrome plating". That is just a misspelling of 'decorative'.
A good book covering most everything about plating . . .

Electroplating Engineering Handbook, Lawrence Durney

To do chrome plating you must first do nickel plating, and this book has a great chapter on nickel . ..

"Sacrificial" vs. "Barrier Layer" Coatings and why Chrome Plating Quality is Crucial
First an aside: Some readers may be familiar with the replaceable zinc anodes used on ships to protect the steel hull from corroding. What the zinc anodes do is sacrifice themselves to protect the steel. Zinc is "anodic" to steel, and what that means is that when the steel is under attack and about to lose electrons (which would cause the

ASM Metals Handbook vol. 5 Surface Cleaning, Finishing, and Coating

steel to oxidize and convert from solid metal to rust), electrons will flow from the zinc to the steel to maintain the balance and protect it, so the zinc corrodes instead of allowing the steel to corrode. Galvanized roofing materials are coated with zinc, and function the same way: the steel is pretty safe from corrosion as long as there is some zinc left on it to sacrifice itself. Now, could you protect a boat's steel hull with a nickel anode or chrome anode instead of a zinc anode, or could you anodically protect a steel roof with a nickel coating or chrome coating? Absolutely Not! Steel is "anodic" to the nickel, instead of the other way 'round. The current flows the wrong way. The steel would sacrifice itself to protect the nickel and chrome. So imagine a steel item that is plated with nickel and chrome but there is some porosity or pinholes in the nickel plating ... the steel will rust away, sacrificing itself to try to protect the nickel! If you've seen a 50-year old junked rat-trap of a truck or car, you may have seen thin pieces of curling nickel chrome, and no steel, where the bumper used to be.

Follow the link to read the review . . .

The Canning Handbook: Surface Finishing Technology

Almost impossible to find, but it's the real deal for plating on plastic . ..

Standards and Guidelines for Electroplated Plastics, ASEP

^- 1. Bicycle fender with low quality nickel-chrome plating, rotting away in 3 months as the steel sacrificially corrodes to protect the nickel-chrome plating 2. Bar rack designed for indoor use, after one day outdoors in the rain -^ Unlike "sacrificial" coatings like zinc plating or galvanizing where

porosity or a hole or bare edge may be no big deal, porosity in nickel-chrome plating is a disaster that doesn't merely fail to protect the steel, but greatly accelerates the corrosion of the steel. Nickelchrome plating is a "barrier layer" plating; once the barrier is breached, it's all over. A nickel-chrome plating job with pinholes or porosity is much worse than no plating at all.

Buzzwords: "Show chrome", "Triple Chrome Plating", "Double Nickel-Chrome"

"Show chrome" probably means chrome that is good enough to be on a winning entry in a car show. Although most OEMs rely on the "self-leveling" property of nickel plating to give sufficient reflectivity to roughly polished steel, chrome-lovers believe that the key to "show chrome" is to copper plate the item first and then buff the copper to a full luster before starting the nickel plating. Whether you start with bare steel or buffed copper, at least two layers of plating follow -- a layer of nickel and a layer of chrome. But high quality plating usually requires two layers of nickel. Salespeople are always looking for advantage, and they will use any good-sounding terms they can get away with! There are no laws that define what triple chrome plating actually means, so salespeople will be prone to call their service "triple chrome plating" if there are a total of 3 layers of any kind of plating, or "quadruple chrome plating" if there are 4. So those terms mean little. By the way, tri-chrome is not an abbreviation for triple chrome, and hex chrome does not mean six layers. But more on that later . . . The most important issue for durable chrome plating for outdoor exposure such as on a vehicle is that it should have at least two layers of nickel plating before the chrome: namely semi-bright nickel followed by bright nickel. The reason for this involves the anodic corrosion issues we discussed. The bright nickel is anodic to the semi-bright nickel, and sacrificially protects it, spreading the corrosion forces laterally instead of allowing them to penetrate through to the steel. OEMs demand very close control of this factor, and there is a test (the Chrysler developed STEP test) which large shops run daily to insure the right potentials. Careful control of this issue is probably the principal reason that today's chrome plating greatly outlasts the chrome plating of earlier times. If a restoration shop offers only single layer nickel plating, they must apply it really

really heavy if corrosion resistance is to be guaranteed, because any porosity or pinhole will doom the underlying steel. Experts argue whether copper plating provides any additional corrosion resistance at all, but with or without copper plating, chrome on top of a single thin layer of nickel will not hold up to the severe exposure of a vehicle! Industry professionals call the two layers of nickel "duplex nickel plating", and that would be a much better term to use than "triple chrome" and such.

Color Chrome
With the exception of Black Chrome plating, there is no such thing as colored chrome. Rather, those colored coatings are translucent paints applied over a layer of tiny aluminum flakes, and should be called "chrome-look paint"; more on this later. Some "black chrome" is probably "chrome-look paint", but real black chrome plating is achieved with a contaminant that turns the metal smoky grey or fully black. Black chrome can be a decorative finish for automobile parts, or a matte finish for non reflective coatings on microscopes and optical equipment, or a great coating for solar collectors. We have an excellent podcast interview about black chrome.

Restoration Work
Chrome plating is hardly a matter of dipping an article into a tank, it is a long involved process that often starts with tedious polishing and buffing, then cleaning and acid dipping, zincating (if the part is aluminum), and copper plating. For top reflectivity "Show Chrome", this will be followed by buffing of the copper for perfect smoothness, cleaning and acid dipping again, and plating more copper, then two or three different types of nickel plating, all before the chrome plating is done. Rinsing is required between every step. When an item needs "rechroming", understand what is really involved: stripping the chrome, stripping the nickel (and the copper if applicable), then polishing out all of the scratches and blemishes (they can't be plated over and any scratches will show after plating), then plating with copper and "mush buffing" to squash copper into

any tiny pits, then starting the whole process described above. Unfortunately, simply replating an old piece may cost several times what a replacement would cost. It's the old story of labor cost. The new item requires far less prep work, and an operator or machine can handle dozens of identical parts at the same time whereas a mix of old parts cannot be processed simultaneously, but must be processed one item at a time. If a plater has to spend a whole day on your parts, don't expect it to cost less than what a plumber or mechanic would charge you for a day of their time.

Blistering, peeling chrome?

If your chrome plating is peeling, this is virtually always a manufacturing defect due to insufficient adhesion of the plating to the substrate. Although exposure conditions can certainly harm chrome, and discolor it or make it pit, they won't make it peel! It can be very difficult for a plating shop to get good adhesion on some things (most commonly on alloy wheels because they are not pure aluminum), but if they can't do it they shouldn't sell it.

Three examples of peeling and blistering chrome on wheels If your parts have peeling chrome, you should complain and not be deterred by nonsense about chemicals in your garage, how frequently you wash the wheels, etc. We'll say it again, we're that sure: peeling chrome is virtually always a manufacturing defect.

hromium and nickel are two different elements, so they have somewhat different properties. Conventional electrolytic nickel plating is decorative, functional, and corrosion resistant but it tarnishes and it is not as hard as chromium. Electroless nickel plating (actually autocatalytic nickel plating) is a glassy nickel-phosphorous coating that is very corrosion resistant and quite hard, and often used on rough-service applications like downhole applications. Chrome plating may be either a thick layer of chrome (generally known as hard chrome) that offers exceptional hardness,wear-resistance, and oil-holding capability, but limited corrosion resistance; or it may be nickel-chrome (nickel plating followed by a flash of chrome for tarnish resistance and extra corrosion resistance, as is employed on truck bumpers and automotive brightwork).