cheeky wrote: ↑Fri Apr 03, 2020 3:31 pm
As Mazak is such a problem to rechrome, has anyone made any ‘new’ castings for Jennings machines or would that be too costly? I’m sure I saw copies were made a few years back.
Jennings' castings Mazak? .... I don't think so.
Aluminium surely, maybe not good quality, but the weight alone rules out pot metal.
Also the reason the chrome plating is
carp is more down to the way the yanks chrome, back street platers over here also.
American chroming was decent after WW2rd and up through the 50s. Then it went down hill, ask any Harley or Indian owner. Over here once H&S started closing down small chrome shops, it became rubbish as well. It became common practice to cut down on how many times you pass it through and what prep you do first.
Rolls Royce have always done their own in house and their work is durable 100 years later.
The metal work is cleaned and polished before acid cleaned and neutralised.
The bare metal is dull nickel plated, polished and bright nickel plated, then polished and brass plated before more polishing and finally chrome plating. The final stage repeated as many as 5 times.
When I was Training Manager for BR in Crewe I had an agreement with RR Training Department, our apprentices and theirs worked together on projects between the Royal Train based at Wolverton and RR Carriage works. Their standards were higher than ours, obviously. But even ours went through polishing and nickel/brass stages before three coats of chrome.
I once sent Jennings castings to a company in Nottingham 30 years ago, they quoted me £85 and after a month they admitted defeat blaming the quality of aluminium used in manufacture. I took the same castings to a platers in Derby, they told me the cowboys had poorly polished my castings and tried to plate chrome directly without any other base plating. They charged me £30 to remove the mess, and then about £200 to do it properly. I sold it 5 years later for about £1200. He still has it, and after 25 years it is still immaculate.
I'm no expert at the witchcraft involved but it's like everything in the world, pay peanuts and you'll be dealing with monkeys.
BP