Skillet74,
I'm guessing that you didn't really read any of the information that I recommended. If you had, you would understand that Stress Corrosion Cracking (SCC) is a very specific failure mode, with certain implications for your particular design/material/processing/end-use environment. If the gear truly failed due to SCC, then the copper plating/stop-off and plating strip processes had nothing to do with the failure. SCC occurs when a susceptible material (e.g., ferrous alloy) is exposed to a particular chemical species (e.g., Cl ions from seawater) in the presence of high stresses (residual stresses due to abusive machining/grinding, overly aggressive quenching, extremely high operating stress, etc.).