Have you found the high quality badges with shinning smooth plating?
Before plating, we need to polish the edges and surface of the badge to make it smooth and shinning, without any sharp edges or many dots on the surface, quality badges always with good polish. Certainly if the badges with sandblast background, the polish need to be more careful to avoid make the sandblast disappear. After polish, all the badges will be hang in the plating liquor for several hours. Then the shinning plating will cover on the metal surface. There are many factors to affect the plating result.
First one is the material, copper is good material. The more big size badges, more difficult to be plated, but copper material is very expensive than other material, so we normally use zinc-alloy or iron to instead it. Even though that may cause some trouble for the factory during the course of plating.
Second is the surface of the badges, if the badges with large size metal surface, that will be difficult to plating, if with most enamel, it will be easy, because some enamel will cover on the plating and some not good parts can't be find by your eye. That's why some die struck badges are more expensive.
Third is the people, experienced workers can avoid many faults that's why we only use experienced to do the important works.
Different work on different plating colors.
For silver plating, it is very easy to get fade, so need to add some important chemical parts in the plating liquor to avoid the fade. For antique plating, the posh is very important after plating, and you may noticed that the antique plating can't be made exactly the same, because all badges need to polish again after antique plating. For several color plating, this plating will cause more additional plating cost, because we need to plate the badges in two times to make it to be with two plating color, and always cause high rate failure units. That's why two color plating badges are more expensive than single plating badges.