Development of Advanced Plating System for Cylinder Bores of Motorcycles

An advanced plating system for cylinder bores of motorcycles has been developed in order to improve production efficiency and to reduce the environmental impact. A new electrochemical etching process, which yields needle-like eutectic silicon on the surface of the alloy of cylinder bore, reduced the pretreatment steps from 5 to 1 because the process plays a key role in the anchoring of the Ni-P-SiC plating layer. It is noteworthy that the deposition rate of Ni-P-SiC layer onto the alloy was 5 times as fast as the conventional process. Also, the waste liquid was reduced to less than 1/10 due to a new recycle system.