Today I took a few hours off work and drove up to Fresno to pick up the electroplated parts and bolts. I was a quite nervous about the whole process—if I lost those bolts and parts, this restoration would come to an early end. After losing the carburetor in the mail, I decided there was no way I was shipping these. About a month ago, after weeks of sandblasting, degreasing, and zinc stripping, I hand-delivered boxes of parts and a bucket of bolts to Steve Torres at Commercial Electro Plating in Fresno. Even then, I was nervous that some parts might get mixed up with another batch or that a few of the tiny screws could disappear into the plating tank.
So when I picked everything up and it all looked great, I was super pleased. I told Steve I couldn’t thank him enough!
It was a good experience plating all the hardware for the frame and brake restoration myself, but there were still so many bolts left and several parts too large for my plating tanks. At that point, I had two options: upgrade my plating setup with larger tanks and a screw tumbler—about $3,500 by my estimate—or find a shop to handle it. Steve at CEP did the job for $400. That’s crazy! All that work for $400… hands down the best deal I’ve had during this whole project.
Truth be told, I was never that consistent with my home plating and often times had to plate parts multiple times to get it right. That may have something to do with the amount of plating beer that was involved in the process.
It took a while to sort through everything, and I found a few bolts that will need to be replated. The rest look amazing. The pieces that were hung on racks came out a little darker, but I think they’ll look great once they’re on the truck. I can see subtle differences in sheen from where I used different mixes of blasting materials. The old oil sludge that had baked onto some parts over the years was tough to remove—it didn’t respond well to glass beads alone, so I started mixing in aluminum oxide. That did the trick.
If I ever do this again and want a consistent bright finish, I think the ideal setup would be two blasting cabinets: one for a first pass with aluminum oxide and one for a final pass with glass beads.
Now, with all these parts back, we’re getting close to reassembly.
