I received my first quote...…..
$650 !!!???!!!
What's normal for chroming a set of valve covers? I was thinking maybe $250-300? For $650, they will receive a very nice coat of paint LOL
Yeah I ran into that when deciding what to do with my valve covers. There is a facility 3 miles up the road from us that I used for years to do black oxide, zinc, nickel-teflon, electroless nickel, trivalent chromate, you name it. They stopped doing decorative chrome 2 years ago because it became so expensive due to EPA regulations and nobody was willing to pay for it (their words).
Other places quoted me between $300 and $600 to chrome the valve covers. It's ridiculous, because I used to get complicated tooling coated with TiN and TDC2 for like $30-$40 a detail though it was far less surface prep.
Screw that. I was very, very tempted to use Alsa Easy Chrome, which is a high solids metallic paint that is good to 800f. The videos look too good to be true, but reviews are fantastic. Instead I'm just having them powder coated to match everything else under the hood. I'd prefer chrome but I can't justify a $2500 budget to chrome everything I want done. I will try the easy chrome at some point just to see how it works out...
https://alsacorp.com/product/easy-chrome/Another cool one to check out is Steel-IT:
https://www.steel-it.com/I've had some medical device customers require this over the years. It is neat stuff but has a very specific painting procedure. You can polish it. It's not chrome, but it has a neat industrial stainless look to it, and is high-temp rated (1200f, not header-worthy obviously...)
There is a difference in chroming jobs though. Some guys go through many steps to get show quality/deep chrome. Others just flash chrome and are cheap. Maybe talking with different chromers about the type of job they do would help you. I imagine quality conscious houses would not do anything to cast bad juju on their reputation.
That is very true. The high-end chrome shops have to bring the surface to a consistent finish, everywhere, before building the chrome layers. A single flash chrome or TDC is cheap because there is very little surface prep done prior.
Most of the money is in prep labor. But, it is still very expensive to do chemical and electrochemical coatings these days. I *may or may not* know of a few backyard pig trough / car battery operations that are clearly not up to EPA regs, but I'm afraid to do business with them.
