By flamin 
Date 01-22-2009 21:42
Edited 01-22-2009 23:29
Interesting. It's kind of hard to tell in the pic's, but is the diamond plate plated with nickle or some other plating?
Edited............because I can't spell.
Hello Kix, I'm kind of with flamin on that one. Is there some sort of "plating" on the diamond plate? Is this part of a buy-out that you folks are using, or is this actually happening on some material that you received as sheets? I have seen some items (made overseas "somewhere")that were aluminum but instead of being the "polished" aluminum or "anodized" aluminum that I would typically see they have in fact been "dipped" or "plated" in some way. Would be interested to hear more about this, so I'll stay tuned. Best regards, Allan
The diamond plate is brought in as sheets that we purchase quite often. If you notice from the one picture where I stood back a bit, the affected area is in a small strip about an 1" wide and 2'-6" long. It almost looks like a strap with some kind of chemical laid over the sheet and only came in contact with that part. The rest of the sheet is unaffected. If I had to guess I'd say it had been plated or something. It doesn't affect the welding on it at all and I would have never guessed that it was plated. I'm going to go to purchasing and and get the vendor info and contact them. I'm interested to hear how they do this and only on one side of the sheet.
My guess is that the stock has an inclusion that has been rolled out and now affects a large area in the material.
I have seen this first hand in .004" thick steel, nothing was visible on either side of the material, but when formed it split wide open, and a slag layer was easily visable, as the split didn't quite line up top & bottom. We returned several 4,000# coils for this problem.
Some alloy aluminum sheet is clad with pure aluminum for corosion resistance. I don't know if what You have is. The diamond plate I have used was 3xxx and not clad to My knoledge.
WOW....
Kix that looks just like a bad electroplate coating....usually cause by contamination/corrosive elements. Polished aluminum tread plate is just that in my experience....not electroplated. I have never seen AL tread plate polished or not, do that in my 23 yrs of goofing with metal. Hard questions to the supplier are in order bud.
Tommy
