If you are doing your own plating, get some hardware from Home Depot and do some testing to see if you are getting real results.
Here's a pic I took today, 2 brake pad clips. The one on the left was plated by a shop in CT, Bass Plating. The one on the right I stripped and plated a few weeks ago. They didn't match so I wanted to replate both of them together. The pic shows what 30 seconds in an acid bath did to each of them. Hard to tell in the pic, the one on the right still has a decent amount of chromate left and all of the replated zinc. The one on the left is just smut over bare metal.
My guess is the Bass Plating clip would be rusty in a year or two with any kind of daily driving.
