how do you restore your aluminum grille trim

-
moparmat2000

moparmat2000

Well-Known Member
Joined
May 13, 2010
Messages
20,878
Reaction score
10,858
Location
Grand Tetons
Hi Y'all

How do you restore your aluminum grille trim? I have a nice set of grilles and headlight buckets i purchased from another fabo member. These are in good shape for 45 years, but they have a fair amount of sandblasting on them from debris the road kicks up. I have restored stainless trim for a 60 el camino before and understand about fixing the minor dings in these, by carefully tapping them out from behind, and flat filing to smooth em out.

However since the cuda grilles im working with are anodized it will remove the coating . Heres what i did on a small area. I started with 400 grit and sanded past the pitting in the aluminum, tgen i kept switching to finer and finer grits till i was using 2,000 wet sand grit. Then i polished the bare aluminum with a metal polish. It looks great super shiny and smooth, but now theres nothing to.protect the bare polished metal. Plus it took a fairly long time hand sanding about 3 inches of one piece of trim.

Are there other ways of doing this to make the grilles look new again besides how im trying to do it? Let me know what you do to repair and repolish your aluminum grille brightwork.

Thanks
Matt
 
to do it correctly you have to straighten it, have it stripped and polished, then re-anodized...
 
i have done quite a few.
i start with 220 on the aluminum anodized pieces then 320/400/600 /1200
then polish and wax.
looks great and i wax every so often to maintain.
make no mistake..it is a lot of work!
 
stripping the anodizing off from the start will save a lot of time. after removing the imperfections (straightening and sanding). Polishing (wheels and compounds help speed process up) have them anodized again
 
I'll put another plug in for cuda chick. She does a great job of restoring . My grill and head light bezels were done in Super Chrome. The bezels were terrable , missing pieces in the grill. I wish I had a before picture but this is the after picture.
 

Attachments

  • 002 (3).JPG
    122.4 KB · Views: 898
I used evercoat on my super bee finish panel 3 years ago and havent had to do anything but wash it. Of course i had to remove the anodized first and then polish. Lots of work.
 
zigs said:
I'll put another plug in for cuda chick. She does a great job of restoring . My grill and head light bezels were done in Super Chrome. The bezels were terrable , missing pieces in the grill. I wish I had a before picture but this is the after picture.
Click to expand...

I think this is the route to go! That looks extremely nice and would be a lot less work I would think than sanding and polishing.
 
DOMINANTmopar said:
I used evercoat on my super bee finish panel 3 years ago and havent had to do anything but wash it. Of course i had to remove the anodized first and then polish. Lots of work.
Click to expand...

Specifically what evercoat product is that. Is it a clear protective coat?
 
zigs said:
I'll put another plug in for cuda chick. She does a great job of restoring . My grill and head light bezels were done in Super Chrome. The bezels were terrable , missing pieces in the grill. I wish I had a before picture but this is the after picture.
Click to expand...

Thanks zigs! :-D I've got a few "before" pics of your parts ...

View attachment 003 - Copy.jpg

View attachment 004 - Copy.jpg

View attachment 005 - Copy.jpg

View attachment 058 - Copy.jpg

View attachment 061 - Copy.jpg

I was pretty happy with the way it turned out too (even featured your headlight bezel in my Shop Intro movie lol :-D).

clinteg said:
I think this is the route to go! That looks extremely nice and would be a lot less work I would think than sanding and polishing.
Click to expand...

Thank you! :-D As you can see above clinteg, there was a lot of metal work, straightening and metal filler that went into zigs' parts before I sprayed the powder. (Most shops just coat what you send them, but I try to get your metal as close to perfect as I can first.)
 
Nice job,that Cuda lady. To do anything,with 30/40 year old aluminum,serious work.
 
CudaChick1968 said:
Thanks zigs! :-D I've got a few "before" pics of your parts ...

View attachment 1714607707

View attachment 1714607708

View attachment 1714607709

View attachment 1714607710

View attachment 1714607711

I was pretty happy with the way it turned out too (even featured your headlight bezel in my Shop Intro movie lol :-D).



Thank you! :-D As you can see above clinteg, there was a lot of metal work, straightening and metal filler that went into zigs' parts before I sprayed the powder. (Most shops just coat what you send them, but I try to get your metal as close to perfect as I can first.)
Click to expand...

What ! You carry this stuff around in your purse to show everybody or somethN ? I like the all metal look, I even steelwooled the paint off my tail light bezels, makes it a whole lot cleaner and i have gotten alot of compliments on it.
 
I cleaned up the Dart’s grill a year ago. The headlight trim was a mess with dents and pits. I started with careful dent removal, filing, and going up through the grits from 220 to 2000, Mother’s metal polish, than clear coat that I had from spraying the tire rims. I painted the black portions with an acrylic semi-gloss black by hand. It looks nice.

This winter I’m working on the GT trunk trim, it’s very time consuming, but worth the effort kicking up the car’s appearance a notch or two.

The other method is to send it all out to be professionally restored; big bucks for low buck cars.

Sorry no before photos.


007.jpg


006.jpg
 
zigs said:
What ! You carry this stuff around in your purse to show everybody or somethN ? I like the all metal look, I even steelwooled the paint off my tail light bezels, makes it a whole lot cleaner and i have gotten alot of compliments on it.
Click to expand...

Nahhhhhh, I just take a lot of before and after pictures. Especially on larger time consuming projects, it's sometimes tough to remember just how it looked on arrival. At least you didn't ask me "Is that really MINE???" :-D I've heard it before a time or two .......
 
Hi leanna

How "chrome looking" does the powdercoat look on the grilles? Does it still have a silver cast to it? I have a friend who was doing spectrachrome.for a while, but the silver nitrate to do thd silvering is expensive. The plus to the spectrachrome, is you can use this product on plastics as well. Something cool would be spectrachroming fiberglass.bumpers.

Check out www.sprayonchrome.com

Neat video.

Matt
 
Hi leanna

How "chrome looking" does the powdercoat look on the grilles? Does it still have a silver cast to it? I have a friend who was doing spectrachrome.for a while, but the silver nitrate to do thd silvering is expensive. The plus to the spectrachrome, is you can use this product on plastics as well. Something cool would be spectrachroming fiberglass bumpers.

Check out www.sprayonchrome.com

This may be a good addition to your powdercoating business. Its not as toxic as working with real chrome plating

Neat video, cool product

Matt
 
I've seen spray-on chrome since they sent me their debut video several years ago. It's kind of cool but you aren't kidding on the initial investment.

zigs up there hired me because he was looking more for a brushed aluminum look on his Dart's front end than a factory style recreation.

But I get that "How's it look?" question quite a bit. Chrome powder looks pretty good on its own but I can't really recommend its use when it will be visually close to real chrome -- for example, you wouldn't want to use chrome powder on your bumperettes riding on top of a real chrome bumper because you can tell at a glance that it's not the same stuff. It's shiny and smooth but it doesn't have that mirror-like quality you get with a nice triple plating job. My "Standard Chick Answer" is that you can kinda see yourself in it but you couldn't tell if you had a blackhead or not. :-D

With the EPA's regulatory attacks on chrome shops the last few years, sadly most of the good ones have been driven out of business and the survivors' prices -- and waiting lists -- have gone up several fold. I've seen a big increase in my customers' requests for chrome powder coating the last few years as a result.
 
Well maybe now is the time to ad spectrachrome to your bag o tricks so to speak. You can do dash bezels, and all sorts of plastics with it, repair and resilver pitted potmetal parts. Not sure how well it holds up to heat and fuel, but maybe engine parts too. They have several color tints you add to the clear so it looks like.anodizing.

When my buddy was doing this, there wasnt much of a call for it in abilene tx or ths surrounding areas, but he did several potmetal pieces, and media blasted em first to strip them and get all of the corrosion out of the pits. Then you basically bodywork the part, and put their base primer material on prior to silvering and clearcoat. No curing ovens necessary, but you need a paint booth and no dust at all.

i think when your done the deionized water and silver nitrate you send back for a credit, and they seperate out the leftover silvering. This makes it maybe not better than chrome in some aspects, but it doesnt pit like chrome, and is a little more environmentally.friendly.
 
That's okay Matt. I've had pretty much a waiting list for over four years now (my turn around time is slowwwww since it's just me doing the work). To further complicate my life :-D, I've also been kind of getting into trim restoration on very selective jobs as you can see from my earlier contribution to this thread. Frankly, Billy -- who helps out with blasting but doesn't get more involved than that -- wishes I wouldn't do the trim work at all and feels that I need to "pick a specialty dammit." If I even mentioned an interest in SpectraChrome or that spray on stuff, he'd have a cow and PSC would cease to exist. In no time at all, you'd see a FABO announcement for the Grand Opening of CudaChick's Custom Coatings out west somewhere. LMAO!!!
 
Hi Leanna

I saw the cuda grilles on your website that you powdercoated. Do you have some better closeup shots of them? Im at a crossroad, payed $500 which i think was a good price for a decent set of grilles and headlamp bezels when they popped up for sale.

Im trying to decide which direction to go with them. If i polish em myself or send em out to you for superchrome and argent silver, or find a spectrachrome coatings company to do them.

Im sure the super chrome you offer looks a lot like the factory anodizing. The factory anodizing never looked like chrome. It was just shiny and silver, so your super chrome may be the way to go for me. Plus being powdercoat its a bit tougher.

I know how to float out the small dents and dings, and file em flat. Done this with lots of stainless steel on a 60 model el camino.

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.

Im sure your very busy. If you see pix of my car you know im not in a hurry for these parts. They can be done in between other jobs if need be.

PM me so we can talk about price to do the work, and mebbe u can send me some closeup pix.

Thanks
Your friend in the big country Abilene Texas
Matt
 
moparmat2000 said:
...

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. ...
Click to expand...

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.
 
I may try to polish out the metal myself on these for now. I have lots of time to do this, its not as durable as the powdercoating, but since i have done this with stainless steel trim before, the aluminum should be a little easier for me to do since its softer.

I will give it a try myself, whatever i do isnt going to destroy it. Im pretty good around this thin aluminum and stainless stuff.

I will try to post pix when i get around to working on it.

Matt
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
-

Back
Top