Has anyone tried to duplicate the of cad plating without the cost?

Photos will be accepted

Cheers

Caswell plating kits

$139 is not too bad to be able to do as many parts as you want.....

Kerry,

Eastman has a paint version of the kit.
Its 3 paint colors actually.
In real life it looks close but not quite
in pictures it looks like gold paint.

the 3 colors are gold, red, green and they are layered to give it different hue's from different angles..

our motor was built with real cad plating on all the hardware, so we used the eastwood kit to do some of the assesories (sortof a match)..

anyways the last 2 pages of my signature line show our rear throttle mount with the eastwood kit.. Like I said, looks a bit better in real life than pictures.

brant

Here is one shot:

I never knew they had that

I guess it's good for an item that cannot be CAD plated.....

kinda ironic... I hadn't seen the home cad kit before..
I like it.

brant

brant - check out Qarl's classic thread:

Qarlio's CAD shop

thanks for the link Jeff.
guess I wasn't paying attention that day.
nice work...

brant

True Cad plating expensive, Yellow Zinc plating cheap in comparison looks the same. As for embritlement there is a ovenbaking process to dissapte it.
Call your platers and see.

I bought the Eastwood kit and have used it on a few parts. The kit I purchased had 4 components - gold base, red tint, green tint, and a clear finish. The clear finish makes a huge difference in the final appearance.

After a little practice I have been able to get some nice looking parts. The parts do look a bit different than plated parts. But I'll be using plated parts right next to the cad painted parts and it will look very good. I have also touched up some of my plated parts with the cad paint and that worked very well.

I am very pleased with the results from using the kit.

Here's a link to the kit that I bought. Eastwoods CAD Paint

Here is the only pic that I have access to right now. I should be able to post 1 or 2 more pics later. The 2 parts in the center were painted using the 4 step cad paint. The parts actually look better than in the pic.

The silver parts were painted with Eastwood's Reflective Aluminum paint. I really like this paint too. I bought the AL paint to use on my front turn signal housings. They turned out fantastic! I had some left over so I've been using it on other parts.

Did my front calipers with the Eastwood kit (minus the clear), turned out sharp (IMO). Practiced on some smaller (i.e. - easy to remove paint from) parts, it does take some practice laying down the green and red tint well enough to make them look fairly "real" (little green here, little red there......crap! Start over...repeat as necessary). I had some new cad plated parts to use as reference, and I'm real pleased by the way the calipers turned out. I'll post some picks when I get home. I think it wouldn't hurt to shoot some brake fluid/heat/chemical resistant clear. Not to 'hijack' but does anyone know of a "tough-as-nails" clear coat finish?

Here's my first attempt at using the cad paint. This part provides a good comparison to the original plating on the square bar portion and the cad paint on the round plate.

The jack plate looked good but the pattern was a little too representative of a spray path - not quite blotchy enough, especially on small parts. So I made a spray template to help make the red and green tint look more blotchy. I folded a piece of paper in half and used a hole punch to make a random pattern that i could spray the tint through. As i sprayed the red and green tint I moved the pattern around a bit to create a blotchy patch of the tints.

Lower front hood latch in cad paint

fresh air box clips

Upper front hood latch

I used the cad paint only on the portion that your fingers would contact when opening the hood. This area was pretty much gray and had a small amount of surface rust before the paint touch-up.

I painted only the front half and the latch tip on the engine lid release. The rest of the plating looked very good on this part so I masked it off and did not paint it. I didn't want to paint the internal area with moving parts and the spring. After the cad paint, the fresh paint area looks better that the areas that were left with the original plating.

comparison pic

New upper rear trunk latch on top, cad painted air box clips in the middle, and original plating in good condition on the headlight motor linkage on the bottom.

Okay, got home and took off the wheel for a pic with my POS digi....it looks alot better than the pic shows. Still looking for an impervious clearcoat to shoot on them. Been thinking about POR-15 clear (since I have some laying around), but I'm not sure how it'll react with the Eastwood paints. Time to do some testing.