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Bright Dipping Specification

I am a qa manager looking for a specification for bright dipping. We call it out on our drawings, but are having trouble getting a consistent look, and we do not have any way of specifying what we want in terms of a recipe or spec.

Mike Scanlon
Equipment manufacturer - Fremont, California, USA
2005

Of what? Maybe you're getting inconsistent results because you aren't giving your processing house enough information! We bright dip copper, brass, aluminum, stainless and on and on - all use different chemistries and leaded brasses would be done differently than non-leaded, etc. What works on 6061 aluminum, for example, wouldn't work so well on 2024. Also, the output of the process is dependent on more than the process itself: how consistent is the assay of the incoming material? are the cutting fluids used on all the various machines the same? is there any variability attributable to heat treating (scale, depth of case, quench time or media, etc.). Chemical processors are all to often beat up since they're the last ones to touch the parts, but often the chemical processing only manifests previous sins, mechanical, metallurgical and otherwise, that are masked on the surface. This is not to claim that all chem processors are to be exonerated, however, we're not the source of all evils that parts' manufacturers saddle us with!

Milt Srevenson, Jr.
- Syracuse, New York
2005