Pioneer Metal Finishing

Pioneer Metal Finishing started in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1945. Over the past 80 years, Pioneer Metal Finishing has grown to become one of North America’s most diversified finishing providers. With 10 locations across the United States and Mexico, Pioneer Metal Finishing offers a wide range of finishing solutions and services. Pioneer Metal Finishing works with various industries, including aerospace and defense, automotive, industrial manufacturing, information technology, and medical.

Testing is a critical part of Pioneer Metal Finishing’s quality control process and Chemical Technicians rely on titration to monitor and maintain the proper plating bath chemistry. Checking parameters such as pH and temperature is a must and ensuring the right chemical concentration of plating baths is essential. This can prevent serious issues such as coatings failure, parts wearing out prematurely, or products not performing as intended.

Prior to working with Hanna Instruments, Pioneer Metal Finishing was titrating manually, and their Chemical Technicians were visually determining the titration endpoint by eye. With manual titrations, the indicator colors that are used can look different to each operator and results can vary.

For this reason, Pioneer Metal Finishing sought to eliminate the subjectivity of their testing altogether and made the switch to an automatic titrator from Hanna Instruments. Making the move from manual to automatic titration was certainly a change for their business, however, Pioneer Metal Finishing quickly adapted by focusing on the long-term benefits that automation would bring to their team and processes.

With a Hanna Instruments Automatic Titrator, Pioneer Metal Finishing is able to test with full confidence and achieve precise and repeatable metal finishing results at the push of a button. By incorporating an auto titrator into their quality control process, Pioneer Metal Finishing can deliver high-quality, compliant parts according to their customers’ specifications and deadlines, reduce product defects and rework, and keep production running smoothly.

“Hanna Instruments has taken the guesswork out of our titrations. The prior method involved Chemical Technicians interpreting a colored endpoint, which was not consistent person to person. With the auto titrator, there is no question on what the actual titration is, because it is based on the pH value instead of a color change. It also allowed our lab team to focus on other important tasks while the system completed the titration automatically.”

Johnathon Cline
Process Control Manager at Pioneer Metal Finishing  |  South Bend, Indiana Location 

Pioneer Metal Finishing depends on Hanna Instruments scientific analytical testing equipment

With our accurate and reliable Automatic Titrator and iris Visible Spectrophotometer, Pioneer Metal Finishing was able to take the subjectivity out of their testing and guarantee consistent results every time. Perfect for any lab space, explore these benchtops.