Chrome cost

[super9064]

Has anyone had badly pitted horn grills re-plated? I have a set of factory grills for driving lights, that are in rough shape. Any idea of cost?

[John Z Goriup]

You're asking about the single most difficult and tricky part to chrome and restore on a 911. The problem is that these damned things are manufactured of potmetal which is notorious for pitting. To emphasize the obvious, pitting means just that, tiny "excavations" develop and there is actual loss of material resulting in virtual cavities, which means that in order to do acceptable work you have to fill the pits, not polish and remove material until all the pits are gone because you will have removed much too much material with noticable thinning of the horizontal ribs.

The second problem is that the horizontal bars are quite close together and none of the normal ( read "large") wheels that are customarily used to polish can reach the entire surface of these "fins". You need to resort to small-diameter Dremel-type rotary tools to polish all surfaces.

The third aspect that makes it diffcult to do acceptable work on these pieces is that the better the job one does in polishing the upward facing fins, the more they reflect the pits on the underside of the ribs which are far more difficult to reach and are usually not adressed at all by platers.

The solution is to electro-chemically strip the grilles of chrome, polish them as you normally would without rounding any edges & corners and fill all pits ( on the top as well as the underside of the ribs) with solder and then carefully polish them with the appropriate tools to prepare the parts for rechroming.

That's where the cost comes in since it's all quite labor-intensive. There is a specialist in Pennsylvania who gets close to $1000.00 for concours grade work on a pair of grilles, although in a recent post on the very same subject on this board I read a claim that similar work was done for a few hundred dollars by another plater. You will have to find that thread and recover the information. For what it's worth I had a pair of pitted grilles which were cut to accept through-the-grill lights replated locally for $ 150.00 ( without having any pits filled, just a "normal" replating job) two years ago and am ready to take them off the car because they weren't very well done initially as you can see by the attached photo, and now are pitting badly in new places even though the car has never seen water.

I just returned from German Auto fest and saw some very nice looking reproduction grilles offered by Dave B. of TRE for $ 37.00 per grille, and no, I was assured they are not the 1/4"-too-narrow variety that are currently available elsewhere & have disappointed so many purchasers with their poor fit.

Best of luck

JZG

[71-911T]

I had a set done by pauls chrome plating in evans city,pa.they do pot metal plating.the grilles came back perfect.as i recall they were around $350.00.their website is paulschrome.com #800 245-8679.

David