zinc plated calipers- or painting options.

[Guest]

I can't recall if I saw a thread or a source regarding zinc plated calipers. I'm considering replacing mine. Does anyone have a link to this?

I seen some pretty pricey stuff for painting calipers.

I painted a new set one time using Dupont Chromabase/ Chromaclear when I paintied a vehicle and the stuff rules- super shiny and impregnable to brake fluid and grime- just wipe em off with Windex.

Ive seen some say you can use VHT engine paint with clearcoat. Any thoughts?

 

[Baz]

I asked the guys at the autoparts store that very same question last week. Also, why should I pay $10 for caliper paint, and not $6 for engine paint.
He said the caliper paint was formulated to be dust and grime etc resistant etc. I purchased the Dupliclor.
Having painted them, I can feel a difference between the caliper paint and VHT. There's enough left over to paint my engine BTW. This is on my BGT....

 

[dklawson]

I NEVER use high-temperature paint for anything. It has very low solids content and almost no binder so it flakes or washes away quickly.

Consider what your calipers are exposed to. Assuming you do NOT make continuous high-speed stops that cause the fluid to boil, AND assuming you leave them bolted up to hubs that act as heat sinks... their temperature is extremely unlikely to justify high-temperature paint.

I'd opt for any paint that is resistant to brake fluid, has high solids content to fill casting pin holes, and handles frequent cleaning well. On the last set of calipers I did, I used one of Eastwood's detail grey paints that gives a heavy, dark grey appearance similar to fresh cast iron. I have been very happy with the results. However, I'm was not going for bright colors either.

 

[John Moore]

on my B I had a bunch of stuff zinc plated. It's actually very cheap if you can find a place to do it. You can get stuff done in either clear (silver) or yellow zinc. It looks GREAT and like it came from the factory. I paid less than $100 for a LARGE bucket of parts to be zinc'd.

At the time, I had already rebuilt my calipers, so I didn't see a need to take them apart to be zinc'd, but to minic the yellow zinc or chromium plating from the factory, I painted them with Krylon Brass Metallic then clear coated them with Hi-Temp Duplicolor engine clear. They turned out great and are easy to clean.

 

[Hap Waldrop]

I also have stuff plated, it's pretty cheap really, the work is getting stuff clean to go to plating. I would take the caliper apart, bead blast everthing, then wire brush it, the palters tell me if you wire brush something as a final prep you end up with a shinier part post plating.

My plater offers three finshes, yellow zinc, white zinc and E coat, which is a semi gloss black industrial grade powder coating, nearly indestructable. I think when I do the vintage, I'm going to plate the entire supension, lower control arms, trunnions, shock arms, engine sheetmetal, motor mount perches, etc.. Now I just have to decide what finish I want, you see a bunch of yellow zinc on race cars, I may try to be a bit different and go with white zince, if you prep it good, it ends up looking like a low grade chrome, which I think would be cool.

Here's a 1275 timing cover I had plated.

 

[jlaird]

Wow, looks like new stuff.

 

[Hap Waldrop]

Here's another example of plating and coatings. This is the Huffaker MGB race car we restored, it had these parts already done when it was new (yellow zinc plated), but we had them replated as it had almost 30 years since it had been done. All the semi gloss black you see was powder coated, even the crossmember, I did the rear end housing as well.