Plating Busbars Help S+S Industries Power Through

First published by Tim Pennington on Finishing & Coating.

Greg Andrews made one of the most important business decisions of his life in 2020 to buy new machinery for his family-owned plating operation, and a few months later, he had buyer's remorse.

"We were about 70% through the process, and I said, 'I don't know if we should do this,'" recalls Andrews, Vice President of S+S Industries in Houston, Texas. "I just had some real heartburn over it."

What Andrews had done was place an order for a busbar plating machine from a manufacturer, a $3 million bet he was taking during the height of the pandemic when uncertainty was the word of the day.

A few months earlier, Andrews and Brady McClellan, one of S+S's Operations Managers, had completed their research on the busbar plating market and found a huge unmet demand for the plating-over-aluminum process in the U.S.

28 Million Pounds of Demand

"There's about 22 to 24 million pounds of capacity in plating-over-aluminum, and there are about 30 million pounds of demand out there," Andrew says. "We saw that there was a sizable delta between capacity and demand."

McClellan says they were hearing from a lot of their existing OEM customers - as well as potential ones, too - who needed the plating over the aluminum process.

"A lot of these were customers that we were plating full-size, 12-foot-long copper bus bars for," he says. "We were doing tin and also silver plating-over-copper, too. The demand was there."

In addition to the demand, Andrews says they kept hearing about six and eight-week deliveries on plating orders from other shops, which many OEMs were not happy with.

"We were lucky if people will allow us four to five days here for a normal process," he says. "So we looked into it, and then boom, the world shut down."

But the pandemic didn't deter S+S, as they contacted the international manufacturer of plating lines and asked about making one that could handle busbars. After an affirmative response, they placed the order and waited for its April 2022 arrival.

That is when Andrews began to have cold feet, and it was especially because so many chemical companies they spoke with about the plating-over-aluminum process poured even colder water on the plans - and the line speed - that S+S wanted to achieve with the busbar machine.

Asking 'Man, What Am I Doing?'

"We had several chemical suppliers tell us, 'You just can't do it,'" Andrews says. "You can't do it that fast. That's when I got some heartburn, and I said, 'Man, what am I doing?'"

He called the European manufacturer about his concerns, who assured him things would work out fine. They even offered him a proposal: if the machine arrived and didn't work as planned with the plating-over-aluminum process, Andrews only had to pay them half the cost for the machine.

But while Andrews and S+S were waiting for the machine to arrive, something amazing began to take shape not only in Texas but in several parts of the U.S. and Mexico: the demand for energy equipment and busbars went through the roof between 2020 and 2022.

Data centers sprang up, 5G networks grew, electric vehicle production soared, and numerous other industries sprung up that called on a need for components and busbars.

"Between when we decided to build the machine and when the machine actually got delivered, the market went to 38 million pounds of demand," Andrews says. "But nobody has put any new lines in. Nobody's really invested in this stuff. So the capacity still remained at 24 million. We really had a huge tailwind behind us."

The machine arrived in April 2022, and in two weeks, S+S had the line running. A month after production started, Andrews says the machine was booked solid for several months out.

Producing 18 Million Pounds of Busbar Capacity

"I ended up ordering two more machines within a month of it landing here," he says. "We will be 18 million pounds of capacity, and we are going for one more machine, and then we will have 24 million pounds of capacity out of probably the 38 to 40 million pounds of demand that's out there."

Andrews calls S+S "the world's largest busbar plating operation by capacity," and a new facility at the shop increased their footprint to 150,000 square feet dedicated to busbar plating. They have over 255,000 square feet in total spread over 13 buildings at their main campus making a total square footage of 400,000+ sq ft.

Jeff Capell, sales and operations manager, says the company's copper busbar plating capacity will grow exponentially, from roughly 300,000 pounds of output per month to over 1.3 million pounds every 30 days.

S+S calls the processing system Hyper Plate and says it is a proprietary, automated pre-treatment process for superior adhesion that has consistent quality, no rack marks on bars, and extremely fast plating.

"There are no rack marks," Andrews says. "If you think of a reel-to-reel machine and how it's a push, that bar is moving through all the tanks at 18 feet per minute. We literally have seconds to do some of these processes. When we're putting a zincate on, we've got basically 15 to 18 seconds to do it."

The advantage that a line like this has over a traditional rack line is, Andrews says, how fast aluminum will oxide over the parts that are at the bottom of a traditional rack versus the parts at the top of the traditional rack because they don't see the same reaction.

"One thing about our line is every bar gets the same reaction, and we can get it to that next step very fast and in the same condition," he says. "Within two to three seconds, it's in the next process, whether a zincate, rinse, strike, or tin plating tank. It's not the 45 seconds or a minute you would normally see. It's a very neat system."

MacDermid Enthone was a key partner, especially Jorge Delgado and Lance Mattfeld, they were instrumental in helping science meet productivity.

"I could not be here today without those two helping from day one," Andrews says. "But really, that is really no surprise, MacDermid has always been our chemical supplier of choice, they supply us with 98% of the chemistry we use today. They are great partners.

S+S Warehousing Capacity Increases Dramatically

More importantly, S+S's warehousing capacity increase dramatically as well, strengthening its ability to serve as a hub-and-spoke distribution system that reduces customers' shipping and storage costs. The new facility will raise the per-customer inventory space allowance from six months' worth to nearly a full year. OEMs can ship S+S as little as 10,000 pounds of busbar or as much as 500,000.