Re: [Chrysler300] Pot metal restoration recommendations?

[Michael Moore <mmoore8425@xxxxxxx>]

Well said Richard.
I have all my chrome work done by Best Chrome in Gilroy,Ca. Like your company, Ricardo and his wife do all the buffing, shipping etc but have plating done elsewhere. 

I have had some difficult parts chromed, and lived through the process of grinding off the old chrome, getting it copper plated, grinding and sanding some more, more copper plating, and repeat until the copper fills up the pits.   At that point, most of the labor is done.
It is very hard thankless work. (S1 E Type Jags taillights are flat on top, and when they pit it is very hard to have them come flat, Its like trying to grind a flat mirror with a buffing wheel.)

There was a time he did $5000 worth of plating for a 57 Cad, and took a bad check for it. The man left the state with the parts and Ricardo was not just out the $5000, but also still had to pay his plater. It's a tough way to make a living. Especially on a hot day as he us buffing wearing protective clothing and has no air conditioning. 

 Mike Moore
300H
 
On Aug 6, 2013, at 5:52 PM, Richard Osborne <reomotorsports1@xxxxxx> wrote:

My 2 Cents: If price is the primary concern in plating, then don't expect quality. Re-plating is VERY time consuming and therefore labor intensive. In order to fill pitting, each pit must be fully exposed, cleaned re-soldered or welded and then ground down and probably reshaped to match contour of the original part. This is why it is expensive and the lead times are long. No magic process, just good old fashioned labor.

Upon the more or less completion of the restoration of my G hardtop, I realized that I had more money in chrome and stainless work than I did in the paint and body work. This was crazy to me as I was trying to avoid the high dollar chrome places. This was over 10 years ago.

The original place I went to: Super Fine Shine did all of the prep work, but farmed out the actual plating. This lead to very long lead times as parts would be sent back and forth quite a bit. I found the end product to be mostly very good. I did end up leaving them as they would not accept responsibility for breaking a tail lit bezel for the G, which are notorious for breaking and impossible to find. Of course I wouldn't have taken a broken one to him…

I then found a hole in the wall place in Northern Ohio, Portage Plating. These were/are good old boys. I had them do 5 or 6 random pieces as a test. I found to be OK in quality, not great, but not bad, I felt they took the time to avoid reshaping parts which can happen in the stripping and repeated buffing process.

When I read $300 for door handles, my first thought was "that sounds cheap". sorry.

Richard


On Aug 6, 2013, at 5:45 PM, George McKovich <george@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Ray
> Frankly, the very best I have ever seen done is Custom Chrome Plating in Grafton, OH. Long wait...6-10 weeks and costly.
> 
> George
> 
> On Aug 6, 2013, at 12:53 PM, Ray Melton <rfmelton@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
>> 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
>> 
>> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>> 
>> 
> 
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
> 
> 



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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