... During that visit he mused about how great it would be to chrome plate model car parts. At the time I knew that my friends Larry and Cliff Read where having styrene parts plated by a local vacu-plating shop around Toronto. I remember Larry telling me that they stripped parts that had chrome on them, cleaned up mold lines and mounted them on racks. He also told me that gloss light blue spray paint on the parts produced a brighter plated part.
Getting back to my friend's musings I picked up the Yellow Pages and I found a local vacu-plater. We called the place and made an appointment to go see them about our needs. I asked all the right questions and my buddy made arrangements to bring a few racks as a test run. He was quite pleased with the results because from that point on he had dozens of plain tanker trailer bodies plated (like the Sunoco tankers). His business was soon formalized with the help of another friend and became the business some of you might recognize as "CHROME-+" or Chrome-Plus... I remember making up his first illustrated price list... I have the original somewhere that I come across every so often...
My friend then wanted a bit more control over the plating process and our next mission was to find a do-it-yourself vacu-plating source... We visited one fellow at the local university who was plating mirrors for telescopes... Turned out that was too limited and too expensive... We continued scouring for information everywhere but eventually he continued the search on his own... I don't know at what stage he sold the business that ran for years as Chrome-+ but I was glad that I had been part of its incubation.
As for me, I dabbled in setting up my own vacu-plating system. Not as a business but definitely because I was curious about the process. I still have 2 operable vacuum pumps upstairs in my garage with a 10 gallon pressurized paint pot to experiment with... Maybe some day... Yeah... Right...
Ten years younger I might have taken Dale Horner up on taking over his business...
Raymond Gallant