Boat Maintenance - metal finishing

[PrisSail]

For those of you with some time and money to spend on your boats, may I recommend a *great* local business I used when I pulled my mast to service it last summer, Royalty Metal Finishing, Inc.  I had a significant amount of aluminum parts re-(hard) anodized, including a pair of spreaders, and am delighted with their work.  I only found two companies in Houston who do hard-anodizing for individuals, the other company has a bigger tank (12' if I remember correctly) but they wanted a detailed work order so they could give me an estimate before they would talk to me ...

Royalty Metal Finishing is a family-owned business, their hard anodizing tank is 3' x 6', and their response was, "Bring it over!"  The prices are reasonable and the service helpful and friendly.  Although I haven't used their other services, I assume they are similar, some of them are color anodizing, chrome plating, and powder coating.  It is a big place, it took me less than an hour to drive there from Kemah, and since their main clients are oil-related they might be happier than ever to see us "little" clients.

FYI, the aluminum pads my bronze winches were mounted on my mast were BADLY pitted with corrosion (very very bad), I asked how to prep them and they said they would clean them before anodizing - well, the deepest part of the pits didn't get cleaned to my satisfaction, so I recommend you carefully pre-clean terribly corroded stuff yourself with a metal brush and pick.  Also, aluminum parts cannot have any other metals attached when they are anodized, if it has SS rivets, screws or anything they MUST be removed (they can do that for you).  I've got several winch drums I'd like to re-anodize, but they all have SS helicoils, so I'll research how to remove and re-install helicoils from corroded aluminum before taking those to get re-anodized....

www.RoyaltyMetalFinishing.com
13550 S. Gessner
Missouri City, TX 77489
281-208-4455