The Context
One of Acculabs’ customers makes critical downhole tools – the kind that go into the ground and stay there, operating under serious stress for months at a time. When a part hits a service life milestone, it gets pulled, cleaned up, and replated before going back into rotation.
That reuse cycle is what makes finishing so demanding. By the time a part comes back up, it’s been through the wringer – heavy soiling, scale buildup, sometimes remnants of old coatings. And yet the expectation is still a clean, consistent, high-performance nickel deposit that can hold up through another extended run underground.
The Challenge
The customer decided they wanted more control over quality and lead times, so they made the call to bring electroless nickel plating in-house. Their machining capabilities were strong – that wasn’t the issue. But metal finishing was genuinely new territory for both leadership and the operators who’d be running the line day to day.
The learning curve was steep, and the problems showed up quickly:
- Incoming parts varied so much in condition that pre-treatment was inconsistent from the start
- The team had no internal electroless nickel expertise to draw on – they were building it from zero
- Cycle times were long enough to create real capacity pressure
- The process hadn’t stabilized yet, which meant variability and adhesion issues were showing up in the deposit
- When something went wrong, it needed to get fixed fast – there wasn’t much tolerance for production disruptions
They weren’t just shopping for chemistry. They needed someone to help them get the entire operation running reliably.
Acculabs’ Approach
Getting the line up and running We were involved from the early stages – helping dial in operating parameters during setup and making sure both operators and engineers understood how to run and monitor the process once things were live.
Fixing pre-treatment and process flow Given the condition the parts arrived in, a lot of the real work happened upstream. We went through the cleaning and activation steps methodically until adhesion was consistent and we could predict what we’d get.
Improving throughput Once the line was running, cycle time became the obvious constraint. We walked the process from start to finish, found where time was being lost, and adjusted the sequence and dwell times. That’s where most of the throughput gains came from.
Adding process control To get variability under control, we implemented controllers on the EN line. Automating additions and keeping the bath within tighter limits took a meaningful amount of pressure off the operators and made the process easier to maintain.
Staying close to the operation Problems came up — adhesion issues early on being the main one — and we worked through them quickly, both remotely and on-site. The priority was always keeping the line running. Extended downtime wasn’t something either of us could afford.
Impact
- Cycle time dropped 41% — from 4 hours 30 minutes down to 2 hours 40 minutes
- The line handled higher volumes without any equipment additions
- Deposit quality got meaningfully more consistent, particularly around adhesion
- Day-to-day process management became simpler with tighter control in place
- Chemistry costs declined over time, as the process became well under control, baths lasted longer, and rework was minimized
- Issues that could have caused serious downtime got resolved before they escalated
The biggest win, though, was the one the customer set out to achieve: they successfully brought electroless nickel plating in-house and now run it with confidence. Acculabs is still in the picture, but only when they’re actually needed.
