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.

“I grew up in the business,” Greg says. “My dad would wake me up from pretty much sixth grade on, and I was riding in with my dad and was working one of the lines. I’m sure we violated several labor laws during that time.”

“We use a live, interactive inventory database so that anyone at a customer can log on and see the volume of bare bars they have stored at our facility at any given time,” Capell says.

S+S is a family-owned operation that was founded in 1977 as S&S Plating by Greg’s father, George, who is the company president.

“I grew up in the business,” Greg says. “My dad would wake me up from pretty much sixth grade on, and I was riding in with my dad and was working one of the lines. I’m sure we violated several labor laws during labor laws that time.”

S&S Plating predominantly serviced the oil and gas markets, from sub-sea to fracking to drilling production. That was the business model of the business until about 2000, when another down cycle in the energy industry made the company reevaluate how it developed customers.

“My dad and I really got tired of the cycles after the fourth cycle,” Greg says. “He made a commitment to diversify this business because we were 99% oil field related. That just had to change.”

Diversifying in the Automotive and Powder Industries

S&S started chasing automotive work as the metal stampers and the automotive plants began leaving the Midwest and starting to come south, Greg says, and they began doing work with Takata on seat belts. That led them to purchase their first automated rack machine, then to plate seatbelt retractors and height adjuster belts, and a quick lesson in mass production.

“We really got to learn what real volume was,” Andrews says. “With the oil field industry, it was three pieces, five pieces, 10 pieces, some as big as a room and a million dollars apiece. Getting into automotive and you’re talking millions of parts every single order. It was a learning curve.”

When they lowered the oil and gas business to just 80% of sales with the automotive sector, they then set their sights on the power industry with electrical equipment manufacturers. They quickly found a niche in that industry, too, and have become even more diversified, with oil and gas now at 75% and automotive and energy splitting the remaining 25%.

In 2010, S&S acquired Coating Dynamics to provide customers with a more vertically integrated solution, and in 2012 acquired Vanguard Metal Technologies. In 2018, they converted the company name to S+S Industries and introduced new branding for the company.

S+S is still riding some of the business cycle waves, and Andrews says they have as high as 450 employees and as low as 150 employees just riding the cycles. The new busbar work has them riding high at the moment, and they are at 310 employees today.

“We’ve really just stuck with the mainstay of continually trying to diversify,” Andrews says. “It’s been a two-decades-old problem that we’ve been doing around here.”

Patented Proprietary Coating to Meet Hydraulic Fracturing Challenges

S+S recently patented a proprietary coating to meet hydraulic fracturing’s toughest challenge, a product they call FracTuff, which works help with wellhead equipment that withers away with corrosion when tasked with today’s high-horsepower fracking operations.

FracTuff works by absorbing and dissipating the impacts of high-pressure water, acid, and frac sand instead of trying to harden the steel against them. The result is enhanced durability of up to 17 times and increased life spans of up to 7 times for fluid ends, valves, goat heads, flow iron, and other alloy and stainless steel components.

“It’s been very successful, and we’re actually launching it in the Middle East, of all things,” Andrews says. “The Middle East has got plenty of sand, and they really want to reinvest in using a lot of American technology over there.”

Capell says the research, quarterly reports, and annual reports show that is where a lot of growth is coming from in the oil industry.

“The U.S. is actually contracting now in the fracking space, and it’s increasing in the Middle East,” he says. “Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, and Bahrain, that whole Gulf Coast region is really going explode here with the fracking market.”

FracTuff is primarily used in erosion resistance, as well as having corrosion resistance properties.

“When you look at fracking, you’re talking about very high-velocity flow,” Capell says. “And you are pumping very aggressive media through there, about 20,000 parts per million of sand in a slurry solution through carbon steel piping. You have transitions and flow, and it just wears out so fast.”

A Risk That Paid Off

As Andrews looks back on his decision to buy the busbar machines — and the subsequent doubt and dread that soon followed — he is happy he took the risk, as it has paid off in many ways.

“I have not been 100% on all my risk ventures and everything else,” Andrews says. “But I have won a whole lot more than I’ve lost. And you definitely have to have a risk appetite. I’ve had a few sleepless nights, but you got to have that drive, and you want to go get it.”

The thrill of making the right business decision has Andrews and the S+S team looking at further ways they can diversify and possibly strike gold on a venture similar to the busbars.

“Honestly, now that we have this running so well, I’m bored,” he says with a chuckle. “I need a new project.”