Hard chroming is usually cheaper. The forks (or ram tubes) are mounted in a sort of a lathe and as they're rotated, the old chrome is ground off, then they're re-chromed and re-ground to OEM spec. A friend of mine had his Suzuki T500 forks done by the same company that did the rams in his Kobelco 5T excavator, and charged him 35 bucks per leg. Cheers, Terry.