Vacuum Plating

Vacuum plating - also known as vacuum metalizing - creates a metallic finish on plastic or metal components.  This provides a highly-reflective finish that can be used for gift trims, display items, trophies, reflectors, etc.  Our process deposits a thin layer of aluminum on the target item.  This yields a chrome finish.  The finish can then be dyed to produce a different color that retains the metallic appearance.  Most frequently, a gold-colored finished is applied, but other common dyes allow variations such as copper, bronze, etc.

 Our vacuum plating services typically fall into three categories:

• Vacuum plating of our stock items - This option is available on all of our injection molded items.  The cost of this is built into the final item price.
• Production run vacuum plating - This entails our plating items supplied in quantity by our client.  Typical quantities are in the thousands (depending on the nature of the item to be metalized) - Typically, there is an upfront tooling cost to create the necessary racks to support the production items, and then a cost per item.  Repeat runs do not require additional tooling charges unless the magnitude of the requested production run increases significantly from previous runs.
• Non-production runs - These projects typically involve plating a small quantity of an item.  Pricing varies greatly for each project.