Last updated 10 August 2026
About half of it. An anodize call-out states total coat thickness, and roughly half of that grows into the base metal rather than out from it.
This is the difference between anodize and plating and it catches shops that treat the two the same way. Plating deposits material on top of the surface. Anodizing converts aluminum at the surface into oxide, which occupies more volume than the metal it replaced, so the coat grows in both directions from the original profile.
Walk an anodize specification back the way you would walk a plating specification and you leave twice the correction the part needed. The resulting number is wrong and entirely plausible, which is why it survives a review.
| On the print | .4990 / .5010 in |
|---|---|
| Process | Anodize |
| Per side | 0.0004 in |
| The dimension gets | larger at this operation |
| Pitch diameter shift per unit of per-side effect | 2 times |
| Hold before the process | .4986 / .5006 in |
Open this case in the calculator, and change the numbers.
Computed by ctrlPlanner. MIL-STD-870, Federal Screw Thread Specification H28.
This is one characteristic. A real part has forty of them through five operations, and every one needs the same walk when the drawing revises. That is what ctrlPlanner does from a ballooned print.
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