I use Caswell for most of my chemicals and I do recommend a mild acidic dip before chromating, I use a sulphuric dip where others have mentioned Muriatic.
My plating work area includes a roll-out dip tank for cleaning, a roll-out tray for my various chemical dips, an ultrasonic tank and my plating tank. The plating tank has anodes setup for plating while suspending parts from wires which is good for larger bits but I found that wire hanging will place too much zinc onto threaded features. I developed the rotating basket and since then I can plate an entire set of hardware for a Weber project in one process.
First picture shows components in the work area and second shows rotating basket, anode & cathode hooked up to positive & negative studs on the top of the bench. The rotator is a BBQ rotator.
It took awhile to come up with all of this but the result is I can keep all the little carburetor bits in-house. A big positive!
