Rhodium doesn't plate evenly

it is possible to really screw things up if you reverse the
polarity with the wrong set of materials but it is not a given that
electro-cleaning must be a fixed polarity operation. 

I didn’t say it had to be one way or the other. I was responding to
a post that suggested that electrocleaning needed to be the reverse
polarity from what the rhodium bath operates with. That’s simply not
necessary. For most jewelers doing rhodium plating on the usual small
scale, one can simply leave the work on the same lead, still
connected to the same pole of the plating machine, using a different
anode in the elecroclean similtaneously connected along with the
anode for the rhodium bath. That way, aside from rinsing off the
electroclean solution before moving to the rhodium bath, as one needs
to chance is the voltage setting on the plating machine, since most
of the electroclean baths work better at a higher voltage/amperage
setting than is used for the rhodium. When one posted suggested that
the electroclean needed to reverse polarity with the work becoming
the anode, it occured to me they might be confusing electrocleaning
with electrostripping, where that is indeed the case.

Peter