Tag Archives: plating

November/December 2004 – Various and sundry

Interior insulation and sound dampener

From the outset of the restoration, I’ve been planning on insulating the interior and inside the trunk, especially below the spare tire storage and fuel tank area. I’ve kept an eye on products that would do the job well. I found two good candidates — Dynamat which is available through Classic Jaguar in Austin, Texas, and Fatmat which looks to be a less expensive Dynamat knock-off. The products are very similar: basically a laminate product with a flexible rubber-like substance laid over an aluminum or perhaps mylar substrate. Thicknesses vary, and the products include their own adhesive backing.

I felt that the Dynamat and Fatmat products were overpriced, since the technology doesn’t look that revolutionary. However, the Dynamat products look like they are textured to optimize sound deadening, as perhaps are the Fatmat counterparts. They do have the advantage of being sized and packaged for automotive use. Since I’m not planning on putting a huge subwoofer in my car (as a matter of fact it won’t even have a radio!), I won’t need optimal sound deadening. I’ve looked around for similar products, and I ended up with a good match in an HVAC duct wrap. It’s made the same as Dynamat/Fatmat and ends up being about a quarter of the price. Physical properties are similar, though the sound deadening properties of the duct wrap has to do with absorbing vibration on the foam side. The aluminum sheet is not perforated or otherwise adapted for sound deadening.

I used two differenty types of mat, actually. The predominant type was the aluminum covered foam, but I did use a purple foam mat as well in the front of the footwell. It is actually a foam pad used for softening the floor for exercise, but it is tough and will absorb vibration and sound well. Since it is durable, I’m thinking about using it as a backing for the “hardura” covers of the door sills and the floor of the trunk. The only concern I have (and it is not inconsiderable) is that the purple mat also has a “nubbly” texture that could (most certainly would?) show through the surface of vinyl. That said, this purple stuff is more durable than the aluminum foam. It would perform well in areas where there would be little other padding (felt or otherwise) and where constant crushing might be expected.

On the installation: I wanted to make sure that the foam would stay in place. Even though the aluminum foam was designed with an adhesive backing, I decided to cover the panels with contact cement so that the foam would stick with more vigor. The purple foam, of course, required full contact cement treatment, since it had no adhesive backing at all. I also used aluminum tape to cover all the joints, and those joints were prepped with contact cement as well. Things stuck very well, and there shouldn’t be any loose edges anywhere for a long time. When I fitted the mat, I cut away to leave bolts or holes exposed so that I can get to them later more easily. I also cut away foam from nuts that would otherwise have become lumps in the surface. The mat will even those out a bit.

Redoing air filter canister assembly

The air filter assembly consists of a large cannister and a triangular-shaped top that directs clean air from the cannister to the intake manifolds. A replacable air filter sits inside the cannister. The canister was especially rotted with rust in the base, and the round retaining plate that holds the filter in place was also badly rusted. I really don’t know why this would have been so badly rusted, since I would have thought that it was fairly protected from moisture. The inside of the canister may not have been painted — at least that’s what I’d suspect from the condition of the parts.

The canister was especially bad at the base, where there is a “false floor” with four round holes showing the real floor of the cannister about an inch under the false floor. I suspect this doubling was an attempt to baffle the air flow and even out the circulation of incoming air. The space between the floors would also serve to capture grits and larger objects so that they wouldn’t blow around near the filter.

I did the POR-15 treatment on these badly rusted items, and I rebuilt a small section around one of the canister floor holes that was enlarged by depleted metal. In order to get the coating to cover inside the section between the doubled floors, I poured some POR-15 into the cavity and shook it around until I was convinced that the inside surfaces were covered. I used basically the same prep as I did with the fuel tank, except that I had a much more accessible area to treat. The round retaining plate was treated in the same manner, and there I had to repair a hole or two with mesh and POR-15. It wasn’t pretty even after the treatment, since the surface was so badly pitted, so I used a bit of filler to smooth the surface a bit. This was cosmetic and probably a waste of time, since the piece is completely obscured and only sees the light of day when you change the air filter. I painted both that round piece and the inside of the canister a metallic, so it looks a little too silvery to be real metal, but at least it’s got another protective coat of paint on it.

The cannister is supposed to be black, at least for the 1963 model year. There has been some disagreement about this, since some cannisters apparently are hammered silver/grey in their current incarnation. The pictures I consider to be authoritative all show a black cannister with a hammered silver/grey triangular air filter manifold. So, I sprayed the outside of the canister and its clamp-on top gloss black.

They look pretty good — better, in fact, than I was thinking would be possible when I first looked at the rusted cannister bottom.

The air filter “plenum” is a triangular shape. Early 3.8 E-types also had a smooth top of the plenum, but they also had flanges that extended outward at the seam of the two shells making up the part. My plenum is smooth, too, though it doesn’t have flanges. Also the inside of the top shell has three grooves that roughly correspond to the grooves that later appeared on the tops of plenums beginning sometime late in the 1964 model.

I didn’t use a stripper on this piece, because paint strippers will also attack the fibreglass resin. To prep the surface, I sanded the old finish and removed any paint that was flaking or loosened with age. The metal pieces for mounting the manifold to the intake are attached with pop rivets, four on top and four on bottom. I removed the top rivets before repainting, but I left the bottom ones on. They are for all practical purposes invisible, and I wanted to lessen the risk of damaging the painted surface when I riveted. The top pop rivets were replaced with new.

Parts for repair and replating

Once you get paint on a car, having to wait for the trim becomes increasingly unbearable. I lessened the strain by quickly putting on the chrome surround that marks the edge of the license plate recess on the back of the car. And, of course, I dragged out whatever chrome I could find to see if there was some piece that was acceptable at least to hold against the body just to see chrome gleam against body color. Alas, my chrome isn’t in very good shape, and so I have to ship it off to have it repaired and rechromed.

I suppose that the taillights are the worst of the chrome pieces. They had suffered the elements most directly. The exterior door handles were probably the next worst. So, those were the parts that were packed up and sent away to a small chrome business in California. The fellow has some experience with 1963 Jaguar parts, and a fellow Jag restorer in the area said he would inspect the repaired parts before they would be sent off to the chroming shop. I’ll provide more information (and, I hope, a nice plug for the refinishing shop) when I get the parts back. I gave up finding a plater in North Carolina. While there are commercial platers around, they want sizeable and regular orders. The single “one-off” plater I found in Fayetteville, North Carolina, turned out not to be very responsible and so I rescued my suspension parts and did them myself. I don’t want to mess with chroming, however. It’s more of a challenge than I want to take on, especially when it comes to replating pot metal.

If things go well with the taillights and door handles, I’ll be sending the same California shop my bumpers for the treatment. They’re not as pitted as the pot metal, of course, but they need some attention.

The front sidelights turn out to be in acceptable shape. Whatever imperfections are on the chrome are small and they are tightly nestled against the bonnet in any case. I will need to work those a bit to get them to fit on the bonnet correctly, though. I’m not going to do any grindiing until the bonnet is sitting pretty on the body, since the shape of the bonnet seems to be fairly fluid until it’s actually in place. The interior chrome, for the most part, is also in good shape. The inside door handles are right at the tipping point for new chrome, and the chrome post that holds the rear view mirror is a wreck. I think it’s due a replacement, not a repair. The various escutcheons and ornaments on the dash and in the interior look good. With a cloth buffing, they’ll be nice.

IRS is next

While I had the entire male crew around, we lifted the IRS onto a work table. It’s going to get the attentions of mid-winter garage work.

April/May 2004 – Small plating gets big

Plating saga

My intention in the beginning was to have a professional plater complete the nickel plating of the front suspension pieces. And, indeed, I made good on the intention on my side. I drove the parts down to a plater in Fayetteville, North Carolina — all sixty-some pounds of them. I was hoping that I’d be able to get an estimate and shake hands on the deal when I was there. I wasn’t in any particular rush, especially since I has seen on the web that this particular plater “took his sweet time.”

I ended up leaving the parts in the Rubbermaid container, because the fellow in back was mixing chemicals and couldn’t break away to look at the parts. The time for the project was “six to eight weeks,” a little longer than I had hoped but I would still have the parts in the summer. The estimate would be available Monday, I was told. It was Friday, so no problem.

Monday, I called. No estimate, but surely Wednesday. Wednesday, no estimate. Friday,nada. I waited another week for the estimate. Finally, thirteen days after I had dropped the parts off, I drove down to fetch them. The estimate wasn’t available, and there was mumbling on the telephone about the sandblasted parts being “too rusty.”

I figured that I would take a shot at plating larger pieces. If I messed things up, I could always send them off someplace other than Fayetteville.

Believe it or not, I was able to use the Caswell nickel plating kit that I had used for the smaller pieces. It was mainly a matter of finding plastic containers that were big enough for the part and that still did not have too great a volume so that my supply of nickel plating solution wouldn’t cover the part.

The toughest part to manage was the “upright,” which is a long enough part but also has a depth because of the fittings for the top and bottom ball pins, going in one direction, and the hole for the stub axel, going in the other.

I thoroughly cleaned the parts using the degreaser and removed any remaining rust — there was a little left, I must admit. I used the strong muriatic acid bath (one part muriatic acid to two parts tap water) and electrical charge to remove the remaining rust. The negative charge goes on the place you want the rust to go (the sacrificed steel part) and the positive charge goes on the part you’re cleaning. The top photo shows the upright being cleaned.

Plating itself was a little trickier, since I had to do the agitation of the nickel plating solution by hand. Since space was cramped, a bubbler or other agitation device wouldn’t fit. I used a plastic spoon or sometimes just jostled the part itself. The key is not to let any bubble form on the surface, since the nickel will then pit. Also, especially in the case of the upright, you have to place the piece in an orientation that will not allow the collection of bubbles, since the nickel won’t adhere to the section where the bubbles collect.

In the close quarters of the smaller container, you also have to watch out for “gassing” which seems to occur when the piece being plated is too close to the nickel anodes.

As for electrical sources, I used three AC-DC converters and, for very large parts, an old Sears battery charger. I doubt any other plating than nickel would have worked, since nickel plating seems to be pretty forgiving in matters of electricity. Zinc plating has been far fussier, I’ve found.

In the end, the nickel plate really worked well on the front suspension parts, but at the cost of considerable tedium and fussing with containers and chemicals. Plating took weeks. After everything was plated, I sealed the parts with a two-part clear coat made for bare metals. The suspension should be in good shape for a long while.

Pictures below show the parts as they looked in April before I tried to have them plated. The picture below that one shows the newly nickel plated parts. They shined up nicely!

April 2004 – Cylinder head paint, small plating, bushes installed

Cylinder head gold paint

When my dad was here, we inspected the tappets that accept pressure from the cams. One of these appears to have been damaged either by dirt or by corrosion. The surface of the plate where the cam touches has been pitted. This will probably have to be replaced, since a roughened surface like that will certainly wear the cam and also be significantly weakened itself. The other tappets show almost no wear at all. My dad says that the cams bear the most pressure of any parts in an engine. They look to me to be models of precision and efficiency.

A previous owner of the car seemed very happy with gold paint on the cylinder head and sprayed the entire outside. From what I can tell, only the area between the value covers and behind the cover over the timing chain sprockets was painted gold, the rest either left aluminum or polished. I removed the gold paint from the timing chain sprocket area, and prepped the rest by removing as much as possible of the gold paint. No chemical strippers were used, since I didn’t want to have to worry about unfortunate reactions with aluminum.

The gold paint I used was the “Oldsmobile Gold” engine paint from POR-15. From what I could tell, there was no difference in color from the paint in place on the head when I took possession of the car, which is certainly not to say that it was an original color. While I was removing paint I did notice (with some momentary excitement) that a “pumpkin orange” color lurked beneath the grime, but I’m assuming now that this was discoloration due to age or heat or both. The reason for the excitement? There are rumors, denied by Jaguar, that at least some early 3.8 liter engines were fitted with cylinder heads sporting a pumpkin orange paint.

Nickel plating small parts

Since I want to install the front subframes fairly soon, I decided I would go ahead and get a nickel plating kit from Caswell Plating and do the front suspension mounting brackets. The brackets fit into the subframe and really need to be installed at the time when the subframe is fitted. The pieces have surface area below the 16-square-inch per ampere of current that nickel requires. I was able to cobble together DC power sources to make about an amp, so 16-18 square inches was about the limit. Plating nickel is indeed easier than plating zinc. The electrical charge doesn’t have to be quite as precise, I think, for nickel. And, perhaps, experience counts a bit in plating. I was very pleased with the results.

Although Caswell suggests plating nickel for 60 minutes to get a plate that is for automotive applications, I went ahead and increased plating times to between 80 and 90 minutes. As with zinc plating, surface preparation really counts. I had already sand-blasted the suspension pieces, but just to make sure that I cleaned up all rust and old plate, I submerged the pieces in a “pickle” containing one part muriatic acid (hydrochloric acid) to two parts tap water. Then I attached the negative lead from a AC-DC converter to a sacrificial piece of steel (in my case an old drill bit) and the positive lead to the piece I wanted to clean.

The process of completely cleaning takes several minutes and I imagine that really rusty pieces would take longer. I wouldn’t leave the piece in the acid with electrical charge unattended or you might dissolve the piece. I generally took the piece out, buffed the faces with a wire wheel, and returned the piece for a short bath in the acid mixture to remove whatever flash rust might have appeared during the buffing. Then it was a matter of following the Caswell instructions, and of course adding some time to their recommended plating session. I did notice that the acid bath sometimes made the surface of the pieces rough, and so the buffing smoothed things out.

Bushes installed (with the Ray Livingston method, modified)

In a recent discussion on the Jag-Lovers E-type forum about bush installation, Ray Livingston provided a sensible way of doing the job. (As a matter of fact, Ray seems to be full of sensible solutions to problems one encounters with Jags!) His solution involved a pipe with an inner dimension slightly larger than the outer dimension of the bush, a threaded rod, nuts, and washers. Basically the Ray Livingston Method was simple: you fit the bush to the open side of the mounting bracket, slide the threaded rod through the pipe, then the bracket, and finally through the hole in the bush. Put washers on both ends of the rod, followed by nuts, and then tighten the nuts to squeeze the bush (sprayed with silicone as a lubricant) into the bracket and finally slightly into the pipe on the other side of the bracket.

Simple, elegant, and cheap.

Of course, if you have a big honker bench vise, you won’t need to use the threading bits. But Ray surmised that pulling the bush through with more pressure on the centermost parts of the bush would probably make the process easier. I discovered that he was right. Also, the Ray Livingston Method could probably be used with mounting brackets still on the car — while hauling a car to a vise or vice versa would be a bit more difficult.

My approach to bush installation was the Ray Livingston Method, Modified. Instead of pipe, I used holes drilled into a stout piece of wood and instead of threaded rod, I scrounged up a nice long carriage bolt that I had previously used in a press.

The holes that I drilled were 1 1/2 inches (for the larger brackets) and 1 1/4 inches (for the smaller). Two of the smaller brackets — I can’t remember now if they’re the for the upper or lower fulcrum shaft — are attached to the frame with three bolts that go into a fitting attached to the frame, sometimes slightly spaced with shims. These three-bolt brackets won’t lie flat on the surface of the wood, so I made a slight indent with the drill bit so that the piece would lie flush to the wood at the point where the bush was inserted.

I found that the bushes went into the larger brackets quite easily. The smaller brackets were a bit more of a challenge, since the bracket tended to slip into the hole in the wood, setting the pulling force a bit awry. This was a rather minor challenge, though. Once things were set, the bush slipped right in. You do have to fiddle a bit to get the bush to go in so that about the same amount of rubber appears on each side of the steel bracket. This sometimes means pulling too far and having to remove the piece, turn it upside down and pulling the bush back a bit.

The shop manuals seem to suggest that a man with a firm hand can install bushes. That is not the case, even with the soap-water mixture that Jaguar then recommended to lubricate the bushes. You need a device. And use silicone instead of soap. Silicone doesn’t harm the bush (at least the ones I got), and it won’t promote rust on the bracket.

The bushes I got are apparently “Metalastic.” At least they’re labelled as such.

March 2004 – Bonnet test fit, plating prep, cylinder head cleanup

Bonnet test fit

The garage had a very special visitor over this weekend. My dad, Wallace DeLong, came up to North Carolina after making the rounds through Florida to see relatives and participate in a travel exchange with people in Sarasota. I was a little worried about suggesting that we take on a project with the old car, since I didn’t want to impose my restoration work on an unwilling participant, but it actually turned out that Dad wanted to do exactly that.

As I mentioned before, Stefan Roundy provided a fine replacement for the bent bonnet subframe. That piece, along with the replacement left subframe from Bill McKenna, meant that the front frame could be put together with sound pieces. The bent up bonnet frame meant that the bonnet itself hung badly, and I was anxious to see whether the new bonnet subframe would straighten out the bonnet fit.

So, Dad and I installed the front subframes and mounted the bonnet on its hinges.

It fit squarely off the front bulkhead (firewall), though the bonnet measured just shy of an inch forward of the bulkhead — a bit too wide a space. We figured we needed to get the space to about a third of that.

We made some makeshift shims to insert into the hinges at the top. Basically, to bring the bonnet back, we had to make sure that the hinges were tightened until the hinge touched the area on the lower valance where they fit. No shims there — we needed to get the bonnet back as far as possible. Shims at that point would move the bonnet forward. Once we had done that, checked to see how the bonnet fit against the lower sections of the bulkhead and the upper sections. Things were slightly wider at the upper part than at the lower, meaning that we could raise the bonnet to even things out.

We did the raising in two ways: we raised the bonnet subframe by inserting a small shim between the subframe and the “picture frame” at the lower connections. And we placed shims over the top section of the bonnet hinge that pivots on the subframe. These two things did the trick. I do not think both will be necessary when we actually fit the bonnet after the suspension is in place, since the dynamics of the frame will change, and the bonnet subframe will probably sit slightly higher as a result. Roger Los mentioned that his bonnet fitting was simplified after installing the suspension pieces that fit into the picture frame. When I first read that, I felt it might be a little dubious, but seeing how the structure fits and acts when bolted down, it is very probable that the rigidity of those pieces will support the frame in the right places, with the result that shimming will be less of an issue. I think we’ll still need to shim upward, though.

The final gap between the rear of the bonnet and the front bulkhead ended up being about 3/8 inch — about a half centimeter, a little wider perhaps. I’m reluctant to go much narrower than this, simply because the thickness of the primer and paint will make things a little tighter. The gap is about right. It is amazing to see what a new bonnet subframe will do to the gap, at any rate. When we first mounted the bonnet back in August of last year, the gap was a crooked disaster.

Front suspension parts for plating

Although I didn’t subject my dad to the gritty glories of sandblasting, we did weigh and organize the front suspension pieces that are due for nickel plating. There is still one suspension fitting that needs disassembly and cleaning. It has resisted my efforts to extract some pretty rusty bolts. It’s soaking in penetrating fluid now. We have 64 pounds (about 30 kilograms) of metal to be plated. I’ve decided not to send off small parts like washers and nuts. These I will probably plate myself, as I’m leaning toward ordering a nickel plating kit from Caswell Plating. Bill McKenna says it’s actually less putzy than zinc plating, and that seemed simple enough.

The platers is located in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and UPS wanted almost $90 USD to ship the parts. I figure that the trip will be a pleasant drive, and I should know what the charge will be without having to spend $180 USD on shipping, roundtrip.

Cylinder head cleanup

The final thing we did was clean up the insides of the cylinders where the valves are located. Five of the six chambers had a good deal of grime in them, and the remaining one (number one) was not too bad — which made me suspicious. I think that the fuel mix was set rich, probably to avoid pinging? Wire brush attachments to the drill made quick work of the grime. The valves were obviously in good shape, and my dad and I wondered if the valves were recently replaced in an overhaul. Dad looked pretty closely at cylinder wear and the valves and felt that the last overhaul wasn’t that long ago, and the engine didn’t require a massive amount of work. We did not look closely at the crankshaft (most of which is still in place), and there is a high probability (in my mind at least) that the rebuild of the engine was focused on the top, and not the bottom. Even though the bearings for the piston rods weren’t bad, the keys in my mind are the crankshaft bearings. After all, it’s fairly easy to replace rod bearings, but to replace the crankshaft bearing you have to remove the crankshaft. Wear related to that is heavier on this engine, so I’m suspicious. When we get to the engine in earnest, the crankshaft comes off and the measuring begins.

Here’s what the chambers looked like after some cleaning:

January-March 2004 – Plating and spraying color

Part 2: Plating and spraying color

One thing up front: the color of the car is not British Racing Green, though it’s close. I decided to go with Opalescent Dark Green, the very color that I liked the best long, long ago. I guess we all go back to our roots. The initial spray appears later in this page.

I got a Zinc and “Copy Cad” plating kit from Caswell Plating and set it up one moderately-not-cold weekend in the garage. I carefully read the book, which was quite instructive though perhaps they could have stood the skills of an editor. I set up the line of containers, donned my gloves, goggles, and protective clothing and successfully plated a couple bonnet latch fittings. No sweat.

They key appears to be the preparation of the piece. The guidelines are simple: get it to straight, clean, clear steel and you’ll be OK. I blasted the pieces to the bare steel, since this was the proper prep for a close to cadmium finish. The original cad was still on protected sections of the pieces, so I had to make sure that I didn’t breathe in any cadmium dust released during the blasting. I also used the 1:20 muriatic acid “pickle” to remove any residues. Electroplating took a bit longer than the manual suggested — actually about twice as long, but I got good solid coverage. After the plating was done, I used a bronze wire brush to make the metal gleam.

The end product looks shockingly like cadmium, I think in large part because the surface preparation with blasting helps with the finish. I think only a very well trained eye could see the difference between “Copy Cad” and the Real McCoy, and perhaps only then if pieces were next to each other.

I can tell that this plating process will take a long time. I am glad that I’ll be sending out the bulk of the plating to a professional. I can handle the small parts and nuts and bolts that I might want to plate.

Well, I announced before that the car was going to be British Racing Green, but I did give myself the option of changing my mind until the paint can was safely in the garage. I did change my mind. And, besides, it turns out that 77RW was Opalescent Dark Green, too. I mentioned that I didn’t like the color of a Opalescent Dark Green car I’d seen on the Classic Jaguar website, but I noticed as well that photography of the color varied enormously. You can’t get a picture of what the color “really” is, since that is part of the charm of an opalescent/metallic paint. The dark green seems to play with light especially well, and it appears nearly black in some light and glimmeringly dark green in other light.

Picking paint was not simply complicated by indecision. The paint codes that are available on the web are lacking in currency. Sure, there are numbers to be found everywhere, but they are for the most part outdated and mostly not even indexed or cross-referenced anymore. I worked with a PPG shop and a Dupont shop in Durham, North Carolina, to get the codes straight. The Dupont shop took old codes I had found and contacted Dupont. They subsequently scared up the original chips and mapped the current numbers.

I went over to the shop to look at the chip of Opalescent Dark Green but was astounded to see that the chip was extremely dark. Dark, as in very close to black — and I put everything on hold again so that I could verify the numbers somehow. The only difference that Dupont noticed in comparing the old and new chips was a difference in size of the matallic flakes. The old chip had very small flakes; the newer chip had slightly larger ones. The color itself was identical, for all practical purposes.

I took all of the numbers I had found for Opalescent Dark Green (about a half dozen of them from various paint manufacturers) and went into the back room of the PPG place and watched the cross-reference database at work. When the new Dupont number was entered, a PPG number that I had found came up. This was corraborating evidence that I had a real Jaguar color. I would have walked out of the place with paint had it not been for the fact that the color required some consultation with PPG. That couldn’t be done immediately, so I left and called up the diligent Dupont shop to order the paint. I was all set with paint in a couple of hours.

The paint has a basecoat of color that goes on thinned 1:1 and dries dull. Clearcoat goes on between one and six hours after that. The clear brings out the metallic and sets the color bright. This process was almost identical to the process for PPG that Bill McKenna described for his application of Opalescent Dark Blue.

I masked and painted the front bulkhead (a scary vertical face!), and the paint and clearcoat was amazingly resistant to dripping. The clearcoat was much thicker than the basecoat, but it held fast. The directions suggest two or three sprays with a few minute “flash” between coats. I waited a little more than five minutes between my clearcoats.

I have to touch up a section on the front right sill bulkhead panel where the basecoat bubbled (bad surface prep I think), but everything looks great. I started with the front bulkhead so that I could get some practice on a “low anxiety” part of the car (as if there is any such area). Spraying is an art. I hope I can master it well enough for the areas that are most visible. One thing I can say is that the years have improved paint technology. I remember spraying my old MG with enamel and having to rub out a huge mess. This paint goes on much more easily, as far as I can tell, even with my very average spraying equipment.