| Motorcycle appearance improvement by plating the component commonly found using electroplating method. Nickel and chromium is commonly used because it makes the component look shiny and resist to corrosion. Nickel is coated first as the base metal, and then chromium is coated after nickel. Plating service providers often do trial & error to obtain layer thickness with visualappearance. Plating service providers haven’t have a guideline for getting good layer quality based on standards. This experiment uses nickel plating current density and duration as the variable parameters, whereas chromium plating paramater is constant. After experiment was done, characterization is done by visual checking, thickness measurement, and adhesion testing. Experiment and characterization aim to understand the influence of nickel plating current density and duration to nickel-chromium layer, and then for obtain optimum nickelchromium layer thickness (having maximum thickness, but also good adhesion) with visual appearance that according to the criteria. Research result declare that the best nickel-chromium layer quality is obtained by using 7 A/dm2 and 5 minutes duration as nickel electroplating operation parameter that give 9,3 - 11,3 µm thickness range. |