Jalopnik; California Wants to Ban Chrome Plating

I worked for years in a shop that did plating in house.

Lots of silliness to run such a place. Our waste water was cleaner than what came from the city tap (which we used in every process) but we couldn't discharge ours down the drain. Had to be cleaner than tap water! So instead it got trucked to a place with a permit to discharge "hazardous" tap water down their own drain. Which was upstream of ours...

The thing with plating is ventilation. Lots of gasses and evaporated stuff. Lots of tanks at various temperatures including many in excess of 200F. Lots of heat. It's miserable.
Some of the ventilation requirements were so bad that it was "easier" to let employees breathe the nasty stuff because drubbing towers are expensive and hard to maintain.
The safety and air quality of a shop has everything to do with how workers handle chemical. One guy being lazy can expose everyone to a lifetimes worth of hazard simply by dumping a barrel too quickly. Even when you take steps to make it hard to dump too fast, speedy finds a way - usually a more hazardous one to boot.
If we were to charge for the cost of all the safety, customers would just order from our largest political enemy instead. No doubt with less than zero ***** given about their employees.
We shut down our most hazardous lines and would do them small batch style only when necessary, and only with a skeleton crew in full hazmat ppe.
Most of our platers were scabby and gross, but not because of the job. Turns out people willing to work around chemicals often smoke them.

In college I got to road trip through a once famous former town outside Barstow where hex chrome was made famous. Not sure what caused more misery and suffering, the hex or the power plant shutting down... Was still a large cattle field with several ground water wells up until the early 2010s. Seems like it would be tough making a buck on toxic cows, but the house off the road had some badass hotrods outside on occasion... Couldn't have been too broke. I guess glow in the dark meat must fetch a premium.

Hex chrome also isn't the only shiny chrome. Tri chrome works half decent but looks bluer. Most people don't even notice these days though because even the hex is cut down with lots of tri, and most are too distracted to even care about show chrome. Nickel can be hardened to over a Rockwell 50 and look pretty close to chrome when done right. Also easier to plate and can be deposited electroless, and thicker without crazing. It won't last quite as long, but it does polish a little easier. Also doesn't tend to bubble like chrome, but it all depends on what it gets exposed to.

Even if hex stayed available, the issue with auto parts is more that customers demand perfection that is well beyond any OEM quality level, and think chroming will hide all their grinder marks too. Car guys are their own worst enemy...

In reality, a chrome shop can print money by doing nothing but hydraulic shafts and heavy equipment parts. The economic reality of CA banning chrome has more to do with the few oil fields and the many heavy equipment outfits in the State than it does with our toys. Last I checked, none of the chrome alternatives really work well on those parts, and the few which do tend to be stupid expensive or just stupid. The best ones are plasma deposited and last I checked there's barely enough electricity left in CA to air condition the governors mansion and his favorite dining establishments.

Most of the DLC and other exotic coatings are saved for aircraft landing gear and space-x parts - good luck getting anything done for less than $cost-plus (x100) per hour. There's more demand than supply, and aerospace will pay whatever because the same kids spending a down-payment-per-year on coffee and can't balance their checkbooks got hired into management to replace their parents when the parent decided to chase a second pension at the DOD as a "consultant".

But I digress.. Shiny car parts can still be made shiny. For the willing, there are also DIY kits for chrome mimics available from places like Caswells. I've seen people get good results if they don't cut corners.