Copyright © Thomas Maruska 2008
All Rights Reserved


THIS RARE BIRD





November 27, 2006

Now on to preparing some of the metal parts for new chrome.
Both of the side fender vent housings had part of the edge trim
broken off and missing.
To reproduce the missing sections all I had to do is cut two strips of
1/8" steel 1/4" wide, and then bevel one edge 45 degrees.
Then I soldered it with silver solder to the housing, but first I had
to make the backing plate on the left side. It was simply a piece of
18 ga. sheet metal with a couple easy bends. The edge trim is soldered
to it and they hold each other in place. Thats why I cut the edge trim
back about 3" onto the vent housing rather than just add on from
where it was broken off.
The joint between the new and old sections will be filled by the
plater before plating the part.

Fortunatly, that's all the repairing, fabricating I had to do
for all the chrome on this doll.
There are 8 numbered pictures that show all the chrome I sent in with
each piece identified as a lot of them are unique to The ITALIEN.

I was having trouble finding a plating shop to plate the hood hinges and a few other parts with the Gold Cadmium plating.  In the past I had used the Eastwood Gold Cadmium Painting system but the problem with that is it scratches off so damn easy I didn't want to use it on this rare car.

I found Caswell Electroplatings web site.
Like Fiberglast, Caswell has everything necessary for the small timer to plate parts in chrome, zinc, gold cad and many other plating processes.
I ordered their "Copy Cad" system and let me tell you, it works just super!
The results speak for themselves. 
No more Eastwood paint here at tbirdsquare.com.

Take a look at the pictures and decide for yourselves.

By the way, All of the parts to be chrome plated, including the fiberglass trim parts,  are at XXX Chrome Plating in Jefferson Wisconsin.  I'll be picking up some of them next Friday, December 1, and I'll let you know the results.




Enjoy the pictures below. When you have an open picture, you can move your cursor to the left or right to get "NEXT" or "PREVIOUS" pictures and "CLOSE" is at bottom right. Once you open the first one, you can click "NEXT" and continue to go through them all

  Right side Fender Vent, you can see the bottom back edge is broken off






Both Vents with grills out, again notice the bottom back edge trim is missing





Close up of Right side






Bottom edge is cut back an additional 3" and newly fabricated edge is shown





Both vents with new edge pieced in






Studs installed on back side of new edge trim




Left side vent shown in fender, making sure stud was in correct place for hole in fender




Hard chrome parts picture 1







Hard chrome parts picture 2






Hard chrome parts picture 3






Hard chrome parts picture 4





Hard chrome parts picture 5






Hard chrome parts picture 6






Hard chrome parts picture 7






Hard chrome parts picture 8





Gold Cad plated parts






Gold cad plated door latch






Gold cad plated hood hinge


































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