ctrlPlanner Sign in

Answers

What pitch diameter do I cut a 3/8-16 to before plating?

Last updated 10 August 2026

Cut it to .3279 / .3311 on pitch diameter for a coat of .0002 to .0005 per side. That is the class 2A band of .3287 / .3331 moved down by four times the coating, not twice.

This is the whole job in two steps and it is worth seeing them separately, because each has its own way of going wrong. The first step is a lookup that people usually get right. The second is the four times factor, which people miss because they have already doubled for sidedness and have no reason to expect another factor of two.

Notice what the plating range does on top of that. The window is .0003 wide, and on a thread it costs four times that upstream, so .0012 of a .0044 tolerance is gone before the machinist has touched the part. Better than a quarter of the band, spent on not knowing what the plater will actually deposit.

That is the argument for asking the plater what they hold rather than accepting what the specification permits, and it is sharper on threads than anywhere else on the part.

Worked

On the print.3287 / .3331 in
ProcessPlating
The featurethread, both surfaces in the process
Per side0.0002 to 0.0005 in
The dimension moveslarger at this operation
Shift per unit of per-side effect4 times
Hold before the process.3279 / .3311 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.

Open the demo · a print is already loaded, no sign up.