And The Future Is Now. Magnesium Making A Comeback.

Magnesium is making a come back. It is in favor with many design engineers for weight reduction, heat sinking, strength, mold ability and more. My history with magnesium, specifically plating, is long. The first project I ever worked on was for a then, little known company called Apple. The part was a stiffener frame for Apple's first laptop computer and we plated it with electroless nickel.

Fast forward to 1996 and magnesium continued to grow. One of the largest volume projects I was involved with was for GE/Ericsson's cell phone. The part was made of AZ91D magnesium and was plated with copper, nickel and black chrome.

I remember sitting at one of the first meetings with Ericsson as they shared the future of cell phones. Ericsson told us the cellular phone market was going to grow rapidly and could eventually replace land line phone systems. I am pretty sure I rolled my eyes when they said it would replace your credit card, your facsimile machine, personal computers, home telephone and more. I remember shortly thereafter repeating the information to my team and they had similar reactions, some of them even laughing in incredulity.

By 1999 the volume on the black chrome plated magnesium frames increased from 1,000 parts per day to 26,000 per day. A simple hand plating line had turned in to a very large, automated, three hoist plating line. Guess those guys knew what they were talking about. True visionaries.

I look back fondly on those days and I am looking forward to the future as well. Magnesium is an amazing material and PBTT Corp has been able to develop intellectual property that increases the strength of magnesium by 4X to 6X without jeopardizing the ability to decoratively plate and/or coat the final part.

The part pictured is casted magnesium that is plated with Type 1 Silver. The use of magnesium significantly reduced the weight over the aluminum casting it replaced. The part has been tested by our customer for strength and closely compares to forged aluminum. The copper and silver coating is significantly improving the performance of the finished product, especially the "Q" value. This is but one example of the product improvements being experienced with plated magnesium.

The future of magnesium is strong and I am excited that PBTT Corp is part of the driving force.