We took our first foray into replating components recently. Many steel components on 80s German cars have a gold finish which was at the time probably cadmium plating. These days, due to EPA regulations, zinc dichromate plating seems to be a better option. You can do it in-house quite easily but the dichromate part is really toxic so we prefer to have it done as far away from our shop as practicable. We have also resisted the temptation to lick the newly finished parts.
First step in the process is to degrease the components and then to remove all the rust by blasting. As we mentioned earlier, we recently recommissioned our home-made sand blaster so used that to blast a bunch of accumulated parts.
We boxed them up and ran them over to Plating Specialists Inc. in Madison Heights. A safe 15 miles from our shop. Two weeks and $240 later WOW:
We couldn’t help but bolt a few components to the car:
We think we might be addicted to zinc dichromate plating now.