Now we offer a wide variety of related products, but silver-plated household utensils is our main product. Starting point of the manufacturing process is deep drawing. a brass circle.

 

Brass circles are deep drawn on our double action hydraulic press. The process changes a flat circle into a three dimensional shape. This process involves controlled plastic deformation of the brass circle against special tools.

 

The next step is spinning the articles into their final shape. Highly trained artisans use the spinning lathe and a polished toolsteel rod with a specially profiled nose to spin the raw shape against the mandrals. Mandrals of simple shapes are made of cast iron. Intricate re-entrant (collapsible) mandrals are made from hard wood.

 

All these processes require specialized tooling. We design and manufacture all our tools. Our engineering section is manned by two experienced turners,and is equipped with two center lathes, a milling/grinding attachment and a drilling machine.

 

Spinning leaves toolmarks on the surfaces. Intermediate stage annealing used to relieve the internal stresses, oxidizes the surface. Trained artisans scrape away these irregularities to produce a smooth surface. This process is called "CHARAK" in Marathi. The tool used is a flat section of tungsten tool steel and the machine is a special mini lathe.

 

Hand-beating, if required is done at this stage. Since the time of the Peshwas, Pune is known for the artisans who produced beautiful hand beaten utensils. Now, the actual forming of utensils is taken over by machines. A few families in and around Pune still keep alive the art of hand beating to impart an old world charm to the utensils. We farm out the job of hand beating our articles to one of these families.

The final stage of the surface finish is buff polishing. Cloth mops rotating at high speed, remove last traces of the unevenness on the surfaces. The mops are loaded with suitable fine abrasives to cut down the scratches left by the "CHARAK". This is the last mechanical finishing step before the silver plating.
 
 

Articles now enter silver plating bath after going through careful surface preparation. Thorough surface preparation is the key to the firmly adhering plating. After considerable research, we now use seven cleaning stages, and a copper strike as well as a silver strike to prepare the articles for the silver plating. We use conventional electrolytes for plating. We use a running water rinse after four postplating dragouts saving considerable quantities of water. This helps us to maintain a very low level of toxic chemicals in the effluent.

Our speciality is in our PATENTED plating power supply which combines asymmetric A.C. plating with electro polishing. The power supply can be programmed to deposit desired weight of silver. This gives us a very good control on the plating thickness of our products. As an additional quality check measure, we weigh EVERY article before plating and after plating, and

 

Environment is a topic close to the hearts of all of us, and we take effluent treatment seriously. The plating process needs to use a number of toxic chemicals. At our plant the volume of the plating effluent is around 800 liters a day.

The level of the toxic chemicals in untreated effluent is around 100ppm. Such a small volume of plating effluent with such a low toxicity is possible due to eco-friendly process planning. For effluent treatment, we have two 1200 liter tanks. In one tank the running effluent is collected; while in the other, previous day's effuent is treated to disintigrate the toxic chemicals. The treated effluent, free of active chemicals, is let out into the city drain.