Re: [Chrysler300] Pot metal restoration recommendations?

[Joe Allen <billandmarilynallen@xxxxxxxxx>]

Ray:

I'm sure you are going to receive several recommendations.  I will suggest
one - Graves Plating in Florence, Alabama.  When I was restoring Porsche
356's for a living in the late '70's and early '80's I had several pot
metal pieces virtually destroyed by the highly recommended bumper shops in
metro Atlanta.  Someone suggested Graves Plating in Florence, Alabama and
they brought those priceless Porsche pieces back to life.  Over the years,
EPA etc. has prevented them from using some of their old fashioned methods
that used to make their pot metal work so perfect.  In about 2005 a friend
had some priceless 1939 Chris Craft pot metal pieces.  I recommended Graves
Plating.  Not trusting UPS he hand carried the pieces to Florence, Alabama
and back.  While not absolutely perfect like the old days, they were very
very nice and my friend was very pleased.  In 2006 I sent them all the
badly pitted pot metal pieces from my Lee Petty '56 Dodge D500-1
Re-creation project.  Again, not as perfect as I remember in the old days,
but very very nice for the price.

Ray, you are welcome to come over to Alamogordo from Las Cruces and take a
look at their work before you decide to send them your door handles.  They
run a very small ad in Hemmings.  Give them a call.  Turn around has always
been fast and prices have been reasonable in the past.

Good luck!

Bill Allen


On Tue, 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]



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