OK, how often do we need to make something look chrome. I have heard you can send it a part you need plated out for the vacforming plating thing but that sounds like a pain. So I started to experiment with Alclad II paints.
You can find out more details about the basics on the web. I won't go into too much detail about how you're "supposed" to do this here....but to summarize....you start by painting some enamel black paint on these guys then get out the Alclad, put it in your airbrush, and paint in light coats. For chrome, the part "crisps up" after a minute or so and looks reasonably "chromed". The Alclad is supposedly lacquer but nevertheless is OK to spray over enamel--can't quite figure that one out--but I am not a chemist, so there you go.
Well, I messed around with this a bit. One thing I found out is that the Alclad black primer, what the mfgr recommends, isn't as good that good at all as it seemed to cause some ripple in the final look.....instead, I think the current thinking goes, use something like Model Masters gloss black #FS17038 (from Testors--I usually don't like a lot from testors so this caused some doubt right off) as basecoat. And lo and behold....For things like aircleaners and headers, the FS17038 and alclad II chrome came out OK and was pretty easy to do.
So I was curious--how does this same thing look with different basecoats?
I went into the parts box and dug out a 327 chevy that was still on the trees. I don't remember what kit it came out of, but the color of the white plastic makes me think it's Chinese molded AMT of some stripe. I painted each part a different enamel color: red (timing cover/water pump), green (starter), aluminum (oil pan), gold (heads), heavy gloss black as a control(trans) and flat white (block). OK, now I need to let them dry and try coating them with Alclad chrome. Let's see what happens (see above--I will post the results today sometime....)
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