Hi Bettye

Good quality chrome platings are usually done over a copper plating, because the chrome plating has microscopic cracks on that will result in corrosion taking place below the chrome, causing "flaking". Assuming that this is the case, you should be able to see the yellow of the copper coating. (A thin line around your ground area. This will indicate that you have gone through your electroplating.)

Any rate, these electroplatings are so thin that just about any amount of grinding should remove them.

I can not really give you the information regarding the fumes, but certainly Cr can cause metal fume fever. Having said this, welders and boilermakers habitually cut a lot of stainless steel with plasma cutters without too much problems. If you are going to do a lot of cutting, I would go for extraction or a respirator.

Hope this helps.

Regards
Niekie Jooste
Fabristruct Solutions

Yes, cutting chrome plated steel (you won't cut actually pure chrome) gives off toxic fumes consisting of chrome oxyde. Unfortunately, I don't know how a N99 respirator looks like. Any good local supplier of safety appliances should advice you on the best one to use.
The local fabricator is right, grinding down to steel will eliminate the chrome film and your cut will be done on pure steel. In this case, you don't need to use a safety respirator.
You can't see the difference in color for the simple reason that chrome and iron (or steel) that has just been ground off have the same bright color. If you wait a couple of days, steel will start rusting and then you'll see the difference.
Take into account that the thickness of the chrome film in chrome plated steel is only a few mils (thousands of an inch), so it takes only a very light pass of the grinding wheel to get rid of it.
Giovanni S. Crisi
Sao Paulo - Brazil

The color of the sparks will change when you are through the chrome. But I wouldn't bother grinding if your cutting with a plasma cutter.

Hope this helps.

Dale Simonds