• Hi Guest!
    If you appreciate British Car Forum and our 25 years of supporting British car enthusiasts with technical and anicdotal information, collected from our thousands of great members, please support us with a low-cost subscription. You can become a supporting member for less than the dues of most car clubs.
    There are some perks with a member upgrade!
    **Upgrade Now**
    (PS: Subscribers don't see this gawd-aweful banner
Tips
Tips

plating small items....and Caswell products????

Share this page

timbn2

timbn2

Jedi Hopeful
Offline
from what i read, zinc is the plating of choice for small items such as nuts, bolts, screws, etc. is this true? if so, whats the opinion of any of the plating products from Caswellplating.com? anyone ever use anything from them?

it looks like a good alternative method for the small occasional jobs, rather than sending out to real platers in small quantities numerious times for various jobs.

opinions...?
 
Tim,
In my opinion it is much cheaper and easier to send the parts to a plater. I have the benefit of having done more than one car so I know a lot of the parts by sight. Also, a lot of the critical bolts for the suspension etc. should be replaced with new. Zinc plating is cheap and it usually costs me only $40-50 for the entire car. If you have a plater in your town they can likely get it done in a day or two. The hard part is getting the pieces clean enough to plate properly but that is the case whether you plate them yourself or send them out.
 
Re: plating small items....and Caswell products???

Hi Tim,

I use the Caswell Copy Cad system (which is actually zinc plating) and there is a long thread with pictures, tips, and process here on the forum.

Caswell Copy Cad thread

If you can find a good plater in your area you could save some time/even money (the kit is not cheap) having a big lot of plating done but as mentioned the vast majority of the work is cleaning up the parts.

So why did I decide to DIY the plating?

I had some concerns about irreplacable parts being lost or messed up by the plater (one story about a plater destroying all the fasteners for a 100 restoration by leaving them too long in some acid cleaning solution comes to mind). Plus the thought of disassembling all the items to be plated for a big lot was daunting. It's not only fasteners that I wanted to plate but seat slides, electrical component covers, harness clips, battery switches, fuel filler tube, carburator/choke linkage, carb parts, guage parts, lighting parts, etc. With the Caswell kit I could pull something apart, plate and reassemble without losing other parts or the jist of the assembly. So for me, doing a very complete nut and bolt restoration it made sense. In the future, if I need to plate just one or two parts I can do it rather than face the minimum charge by the plater.

Cheers,
John
 
Re: plating small items....and Caswell products???

I have to agree with John Loftus on this one. Locally we have platers that'll do a "bucket" of stuff for $40 but you have to be very careful. I never liked the idea of carefully taking something apart and storing all the parts in separate bags and carefully label, only to have to throw all these parts into a "bucket" for plating. Too easy to lose parts.
 
Back
Top