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How much investment is needed for a small plating workshop?

adv.

There are some small industries that do electroplating in El Salvador, but the quality of their work is really not very good. I think this is due to the lack of a formal training and fundamental knowledge of the electro plating technique. I think that electro plating can become a good business in El Salvador and I am willing to learn about it before starting this business project. My only concern now is that before start buying books and visiting plating workshops I need to have a rough idea of how much $$$ should I invest to have a small electro plating workshop. Can somebody give me a non-accurate estimate of how much investment is needed and if possible an estimated operative cost?

Jose Luis Chavarria
Business enthusiastic - San Salvador, El Salvador
2004

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Hi Jose. A few decades ago a small start-up shop in the USA could use old industrial battery cases and polyethylene barrels for tanks, residential fans for ventilation, wooden boardwalks for access, and cobble together used components in his garage or small metal building. This was for very low production special items, not mass production, of course, but it allowed entry into the plating business at low cost. The shop looked terrible, was inherently unsafe and polluting, and I'm glad that we are away from those days.

But if we are to be honest: If you are serving local consumers and very small businesses so the looks of your shop don't matter, and if you do not have regulations covering the discharge of rinse water, accumulation of waste, secondary containment in the event of leaks, and formal exhaust ventilation and fume scrubbing, as we now have in the USA, you can get into the plating business with a very low investment.

In the USA, no matter what business you are in, labor cost is always the principle cost. If you are going to do all the plating by yourself, your operational costs will not be high.

Of course, some of the owners of the shops in the USA who did what I described ended up in jail for pollution violations. Others ended up chained for a lifetime to a shop they hated but could not close because cleanup costs would have taken far more than their life savings and left them without a roof over their head, and their only miserable option was to keep the shop open until they died. But some other shops who started casually were able to keep up with changing times and are nice places today. You have to judge for yourself the political climate and whether a shop you open today could haunt you a couple of decades from now, or whether you can keep up with changing times and parley a minimal start-up investment into a nice modern plating shop. Good luck with it.

Ted Mooney, P.E.
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
2004