You can crome plate wheels or anything else, the process has been avaialble for more than 100 years. The reason you can't find many shops that will do chrome plating these days is because the process is highly toxic and "environmentally unfriendly". In many towns or cities, it has been made illegal to do it.
In the 1950's and '60's, I knew several shops in my neighborhood that did chrome plating. I knew the owners of those shops and many of the people that worked there. Every one of them died of cancer, at an unreasonbly early age.
The few shops that still do chrome plating have had to spend thousands of dollars investing in equipment, equipment that was never required "back in the day". From a health standpoint, "hexavalent chromium" is the most toxic form of chromium. In the U.S., the
Environmental Protection Agency regulates it heavily. The EPA lists hexavalent chromium as a
hazardous air pollutant because it is a human
carcinogen, a "priority pollutant" under the
Clean Water Act, and a "hazardous constituent" under the
Resource Conservation and Recovery Act. Due to its low cathodic efficiency and high solution
viscosity, a toxic mist of water and hexavalent chromium is released from the bath.
Wet scrubbers are used to control these emissions. The discharge from the wet scrubbers is treated to
remove (or try to remove) the chromium from the solution because it cannot remain in the waste water. In short, there is not enough money in doing chrome plating anymore, to make it worth the cost of meeting these stringent requirements or to even find employees willing to work in that kind of environment.