Deja Vu: 1971 Restoration

[motorman7]

The Plating Process:  Spent several hours yesterday (before Easter activities) prepping parts for plating.  The plating is a very involved process and prep is the most important thing.  Since I am doing a large number of parts, I will be sending these out for plating where they can plate these in large barrels.  I have my own set-up, but it is better suited for low quantity work.

      The first step is to clean the oil and gunk off of the original parts.  Usually I will do this by putting the parts in my paint thinner/lacquer thinner mix, using a brush to clean off the parts.  This will remove most of the oily stuff and loose junk.  Then I will dry the parts on a cloth.  The parts need to be free of oils or they will contaminate your wire wheel.  Once that is contaminated it spreads to all the parts, so this needs to be clean.  I also intermittently clean the wire wheel with lacquer thinner just for good measure.  

    After the parts are dry, I remove all the rust, paint and plating using the wire wheel.  This can be a bit tricky as most of the parts are somewhat small.  Typically I will wear a leather glove on my left hand and thin latex glove on the right.  Goggles are a must as the little wires will occasionally fly off in addition to the debris and occasionally the part itself.  A small breathing mask is also useful due to the dust.  The part needs to be completely cleaned of the old material or the new zinc will not stick or look good.

    I also use a fiber wheel for cosmetic purposes after the parts have been wire wheeled.  The fiber wheel makes surfaces super shiny which will also make the plating super shiny.  Usually I will do the bolt heads and other very visible parts on the fiber wheel.  

At this point the parts need to be plated fairly soon or they will quickly rust.  The parts are essentially naked at this point. 

Some people prefer to sand blast parts before plating.  This is convenient for tight spaces but results in a somewhat dull finish. 

This is a fairly laborious process, but it's the little details that really make the car.

 

Pics are below.

[Patcon]

Where did you get the fiber wheel? What grit is it?

[motorman7]

1 hour ago, Patcon said:

Where did you get the fiber wheel? What grit is it?

The two orange ones are kind of worn out, but they came with the Caswell plating kit.  Caswell lists them as a 'Nylon abrasive wheel' with no grit specified.  Since they were worn, I got the blue one at Home Depot.  It is designed for a drill, but I drilled out the center drill shank with a 1/2" bit and sandwiched it between the two orange ones.  Seems to work pretty well.  I don't know what the grit is but it originally looked like this.  

https://www.amazon.com/Dico-541-784-4-Nyalox-Wheel-4-Inch/dp/B00004YYD9/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1492481361&sr=8-3&keywords=Abrasive+wheel

240 grit is about right.

[Patcon]

Thanks

Time to start my plating up again soon...

[motorman7]

Updates from the paint shop

[motorman7]

The inspection lights are multiplying .  I cleaned up the original for this car and sent it off to the platers along with the engine bolts and other parts to get the yellow zinc plating.  Should get those parts back tomorrow.  Can't wait to see them.  I will drop off the silver zinc parts when I pick up the yellow parts. 

Still had a very hard time getting the air galley off even after soaking the air fittings for well over a week.  I was not able to salvage the air galley that came with the exhaust manifold, but I was able to get out all of the fittings in tact, mostly.  Five I was able to unthread using vise grips and a hammer.  One I had to drill and tap, so not to bad.  Tapped with the 1/4 BPST tap.  I will run the tap through the other five ports just to make sure they are all cleaned up.   Then I will send this off to get ceramic coated.  Pics are below

 

 

[Zup]

I feel for you regarding the air injection tube removal Rich!

Everyone talks about the spindle pins being a bitch to remove----HA!

They  haven't done this yet, or they would say spindle pins are the second most difficult job. I gave up, and went to the machine shop, where the manifold went into a very hot penetrating oil immersion for hours, followed by heating to 500* before being persuaded with brute force to yield. Same story---the injection tube nuts were so scarred that it could not be cleaned up enough for re-plating for re-use.

Oh well---the new injection tubes, once installed,  are expensively beautiful!

Great to see your progress, and I can almost feel your anticipation growing as everything starts coming together. Makes all the effort most rewarding!

[motorman7]

Hi Jim,

      Darn near impossible to get those fittings out in a clean manner.  The list of items I utilized over the last week and a half include, PB Blaster, Kroil, Muriatic Acid, and a high temp torch.  After all that, and using a 14mm flare wrench, I could not get those things lose.  Anyway, I am glad they are out and fortunately I have a nice one to put on.  Hopefully I will get that today with fresh plating.

It's pretty exciting with all the stuff going on and things are progressing very quickly.  Body is coming along well at the paint shop, dash is at "Just Dashes", sent the carbs and intake manifold off to ZTherapy last week (insured UPS shipping was just $28), and parts are being plated just down the street.  Will be nice when this all comes together.

Thanks for the words of encouragement.

Best regards,

     Rich

[Montezuma]

Look at all those Zs in background of the picture...all three (all 71s) belong to 2 guys plus 2 more in the shop.  Rich I hope you have a hand in the resurrection of that 71 GNose you see there; it's last registered owner was Willie Buchanon of NFL fame.  I plan to restore it to the way Willie drove it. 

[motorman7]

Hi Dave,

    The '71 will be fun to work on.  Looking forward to it.

 

Got the first batch of Yellow zinc parts back.  They look so pretty!  Pics are lousy though, flourescent lights are the worst for photos.   Also got new flat and lock washers in from Belmetric.  It's not worth the time to wire wheel and plate washers since you can get most of these for 6 to 10 cents each.  Much cheaper and simpler to go this way for the washers.

[Montezuma]

Looking so good.

 

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[Montezuma]

The jewelry looks so good, I have get some of mine together to do a batch too.

 

 

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