[Chrysler300] Pot metal restoration recommendations?

[Ray Melton <rfmelton@xxxxxxx>]

Hello Group -

 

In the midst of restoring my late father's 1957 Chrysler 300C convertible, I
decided that the door handles needed to be refinished - I originally thought
they looked good enough (visually about 9/10) with only a few tiny pits, but
soon the rest of the car was looking so good  that it began to make the door
handles look a bit shabby, although nothing broken and only a half-dozen or
so pin-hole sized pits and zits on each of the pull-up parts of the handle.
I sent the handles, minus attached linkage (four pieces: the stationary part
and the moveable handle part) to a place in Fresno that bragged about their
beautiful work, particularly on restoring pot metal motorcycle parts - their
website shoed a dozen excellent before/after examples.  I said that of
course I wanted the tiny pits and zits filled, not just sanded away, which
would have badly degraded the decorative horizontal ridges in the pull-up
parts of the handles.  Two months and $300 later the parts came back with
deep, shiny chrome over the totally untouched tiny pits and zits, which
actually highlighted the small defects!  When contacted about the
unacceptable work, the shop manager said, "I think they look pretty good;
I'd put them on my car", and refused to refund my money!  However, he
offered to re-do them to a better standard if I would pay him $75/hour for
an indeterminate number of hours to refinish them like should have been done
in the first place!  Needless to say, I don't want to do business again with
a shop that harbors that attitude!

 

Then I looked in Hemming's and selected a place in Pennsylvania with the
best-looking and best-sounding ad, and a month later received their estimate
of $1013!  That huge number just seemed so far out of line (I was thinking
more like $500) that I had the handles sent back to me untouched.  To their
credit, they didn't even charge me for the return shipping - clearly a
stand-up place.  

 

So now I am appealing to the collective experience of other Club members for
recommendations on where to have this work done, hopefully with a short
anecdote regarding their experience in terms of work quality and cost.
Also, I would like to know whether the shop uses the three-step
copper-nickel-chrome process, and whether they use the old-school hexavalent
chrome (renowned for its deep luster but severely restricted by the EPA) or
the later trivalent chromium (less onerous EPA regulated, but said by some
to not quite match up to the deep luster of the hexavalent chrome).  While I
don't consider the hexavalent vs. trivalent issue to be the priority
consideration, it would be interesting to know what was used on your parts
pot-metal parts. 

 

Any help will be much appreciated!

 

Ray Melton

Las Cruces, NM

 



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