how do you restore your aluminum grille trim
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What kind of a deal can you give me if i dissassemble the grilles, float out the dents, file em smooth, and glass bead the parts to get em close to prepped as possible? This is all determined on weather or not i like the closeup pix of the superchrome on another cuda grille you have done, and of course weather or not you have the time to do the work. ...
Matt, my
Super Chrome powder really looks nothing like factory anodizing, although my supplier offers over 6,500 powder colors including some that are "anodized looking." The powders I used on the Cuda grille in this thread were selected based on a very well-respected professional Mopar trim restorer's actual paint samples so they're about as accurate to the factory's colors as I can get. (The advantage I have over what my friend Dana used is that my powders are UV stable whereas his paints never were; they would oxidize over time and eventually the colors would fade.)
I quote every job individually to be fair to everyone Matt and bill at $25 an hour across the board before your FABO labor discount gets applied (5% or 10% for Gold Members). The more of your own prep work you can do yourself the better ... it saves me time and as a result ends up saving you money.
You'll see from the "before" pictures up there that the grille I restored needed a
lot of work and the headlight bezel corners had to be essentially reconstructed due to prior excessive damage. I won't pull your lariat and tell you it was cheap or easy -- it wasn't -- nor will I claim that they turned out perfect -- they didn't -- but they ARE a lot better than what I started with.
Aside from the extensive metal prep work itself, powder colors can only be applied and cured one at a time; with multiple colors on the same part, there was a lot of time consuming custom masking along with even more tedious unmasking (to keep the raw powder colors separate and the color breaks sharp and crisp) and it can really add up, especially on physically larger parts like grille surrounds.
I see you PM'd me with your email address so I'll shoot you out some close ups if I still have them. I'll tell you straight up that my turn-around time is pretty dang awful when compared to other shops (especially so
these last few months) and even straight powder coating jobs are unfortunately taking more than just a few weeks to get home to their owners. At least from what I hear the work is worth waiting for :-D so it could be a lot worse. LOL!
Thanks for your post! If you have any other questions after taking a look at the pictures I'm going to send you, just give me a call.