Before
AFTER!!!!!!!!
Here is the first batch. It cost me 1.065 Boat units. That would be $1065.00 on land, or a mere 266.25 gallons of gasoline in central Ohio!
A couple of my favorite pieces of metal sculpture.
This my fellow Commandsters is called a "hawse pipe or hawse hole plate". It is a through deck fitting that the line chases through to a cleat mounted below deck. I never knew it had a name until I tried to compare the price of re plating to purchasing new.
This is inside the shop I took the parts to. They specialize in custom work on cars, boats and motorcycles. They have three grades of work.
1) Standard for not so important pieces of steel.
2) High Quality which is triple plated Copper, Nickle, then Chrome
3) Show This wood be for the "Concourse" Baby Gar going to Tahoe this august. The polishing and copper fill would probably be repeated until there were absolutely no pits or defects at all.
The 2 major factors for re plating to cost so damn much are; 1)the EPA, the costs to properly dispose of the toxic waste are enormous. And of course labor. It is much more that a quick dip here and there. Back in the days of chrome bumpers, a good friend of mine had a bumper chroming business in down town Columbus, Ohio. The toilet bowl was a strange color of green due to something the old timers dumped in there way back when. On weekends used to get a couple beers and take our motorcycle parts down and polish and plate them ourselves. Trust me polishing metal is a dirty, hard and dangerous job. The polishing wheels can catch an edge and fling a 5lb. piece of steel across the room at 100mph!
We could only do steel parts because they didn't have the permits necessary to have copper tanks.(something to due with there old way of disposal, the toilet maybe?) Anyway soft metals like aluminum, brass and bronze require the copper plate to fill pits and so forth. First you have to strip and polish the piece to a mirror finish. Plating is like clear coating a paint job, the plating just makes it shinny pits and all. After polishing comes the copper and then more polishing. You get the idea, it is just like anything else on our boats. It is the unseen prep work that takes all the time but, also achieves the quality of finished product we expect or at least hope for.
To reiterate Chrome cost = Chemicals, Disposal, and Polishing Labor. Oh yea, they gotta keep the lights on, too!
Do I sound like a Chrome salesman, I do gotta' clear the next batch through the boss. I am just practicing!
Yours Truly, Chris
