Polishing
Rhodium copies the surface underneath it, exactly.
Plating copies the surface underneath it exactly. Every mark left before the bath is a mark sealed under rhodium — so polishing is not the finishing touch, it is the preparation.
Magnetic polish
Fine stainless steel pins in a bowl, driven into a storm by magnets turning underneath. The pins find their way inside chain links, through filigree and into the corners of a gallery — everywhere a cloth wheel physically cannot go.
Why it matters
It burnishes rather than cuts. The surface is compressed and brightened, not ground away, so detail and weight both survive.
Dhaga polish
Thread, charged with compound and drawn through the piece by hand — between links, behind settings, inside the openings of carved work. Pure hand skill and pure patience.
Why it matters
Nothing else reaches these places at all. On an openwork or temple piece, dhaga polish is the difference between clean and merely clean-looking from the front.
Before the bath
Four cleaning steps, and skipping any of them shows up weeks later
Rhodium bonds to clean metal and to nothing else. A fingerprint, a smear of polishing compound left in a recess, a trace of oil — the plate goes over it, looks perfect, and lifts from that patch in a few weeks. Almost every plating failure is a cleaning failure.
- 1
Ultrasonic
Cavitation lifts polishing compound and grease out of the recesses. Compound left behind is the single commonest cause of patchy plating.
- 2
Steam
Blasts out what the ultrasonic loosened, including from under settings.
- 3
Electro-clean
A reverse current strips the last invisible film off the surface so metal meets metal.
- 4
Acid dip & rinse
Neutralises and activates the surface, then rinses, so nothing is carried into the plating bath.
The order it has to happen in
This is not a preference. Each step destroys the work of the one before it if they are done the wrong way round.
Polish after plating and you have polished the rhodium off. Clean before polishing rather than after and you have simply cleaned a piece that is about to be covered in compound. It reads as obvious written down, and it is the commonest thing to get wrong when a piece passes between two workshops.
What else decides whether plating lasts →Polishing and plating from one bench
Which is the point: nobody hands the piece over half-prepared, and nobody has to guess what the last workshop did to it.
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