After a 2 year hiatus, I'm gearing up to reassemble and reinstall my front suspension crossmember.

I have my calipers stripped down and would like to get them cadmium plated as they were from the factory. Can the entire caliper halves be plated or do I need to give the plater special instructions to plug off the internals? I suppose this same question would apply to the fuel rail which I'll also get plated at a later date.

 

I'd ask your plater and see what they think, but I'd be inclined to think the threads and the piston bores would need to be masked off.

Also - I'm curious how much it costs to have something like that plated. Do you mind sharing what they charge?

 

Years ago, I had some calipers cad plated. I did not mask off anything, and had no issues. In my case, they were barrel plated, and went thru the process several times to get enough on them. I did lightly hone the piston bores when they were done.
Rack plating would likely be better, if you can find a place to do it. Even 15 years years ago, it was hard to find anyone who could cad plate, whether barrel or rack. The EPA made it tough. Now days, most people use gold zinc plating, which is close in appearance.

 

I home plated mine a few years ago in yellow passivated zinc. Worked out fine and almost indistinguishable from cadmium.
No masking since plating thickness is not an issue

 

Agree. Cad plating is fine, just clean and dip. No masking required.

 

Sounds like there's a consensus that no masking is required, fantastic.

Turns out finding a company that will take on a low volume, hobbyist job isn't easy (who would've thought right?). I found Electro-Plating, Inc. out of Wisconsin who advertise being one of the only places left who do cadmium plating for restorations but there is a $400 minimum. When I called to ask generally what kind of volume of parts I could have plated to meet the minimum charge they were less than enthusiastic to take my call and gave me the impression that I was wasting their time, so no dice there. The one piece of information I was able to glean from our rather unpleasant interaction was that hardware has to be barrel plated and larger parts have to be rack plated and it was $400 per process, so for my needs the minimum would actually be $800! Scanning classic restoration forums I found referrals to a number of firms across the country who are all now defunct.

Locally there's a place called Electroplating Solutions who will do a yellow zinc coating on the calipers plus a few other bits for $120. I'd really prefer to stick to the original cadmium finish, but given that I don't have a concourse budget or much patience for being treated like I'm stupid for asking basic questions I think I'll go this route.

If anyone has a line on a cadmium plater in the US I'd be eternally grateful; barring that I'll report back with the results of the yellow zinc coating when done.

Thanks everyone!

 

I think it might be cheaper and a whole lot less grief if you bought remanufactured ones. My own view, and I hesitate to disagree with Baxtor, who is very knowledgeable on all things XJS, I would mask the cylinder bores.

 

Here's 1/2 of the finished product. The electroplater I used said that he does calipers all the time and there's no need to mask the cylinder bores.

As Greg eluded to, this project ended up costing about what a set of refurbished calipers cost. But I learned a few things and had fun doing it which is what this whole project is about for me. Also, most of the refurb calipers I looked at were finished in silver zinc and I wanted to mimic the OE cad plating as best I could.

One thing to note for anyone planning on rebuilding their own calipers is that the seal kit supplied by SNG includes everything EXCEPT the caliper joining seals. It took me a while to track them down but they are part# 583-820 from Moss Motors. I was tempted by the stainless pistons on offer but at twice the cost they didn't seem worth it here in California so I went with new standard pistons. The new pistons are spun while the originals look like they were turned out of a casting; not sure of any potential benefits/drawbacks of this.

It's almost time to assemble the front subframe, stay tuned..

 

That's really a great look - it looks much more original than powder coating them.

 

There is a ton of cad under the hood, and the few I’ve seen with it redone look beautiful and interesting. Never thought about the calipers!

 

Thanks guys, I'm very happy with the result. I've long admired the XJ-S restorations done by Knowles-Wilkins Engineering. I was fortunate enough to tour their facility when visiting the UK in 2011 and I'm now modeling my own XJ-S restoration on some of their techniques. They were working on the suspension for a 7-Litre Lister coupe when I visited and that's where I got the idea about plating the calipers. The owner also took me on a test ride in the ice blue XJ-S coupe that James May reviewed on Top Gear.

The plan going forward is to pull the engine for reconditioning and to fit the manual transmission once the suspension is complete. Hopefully it'll be easier to extract the engine/transmission without the subframe in the way. I'm going to plate everything that was cad plated in yellow zinc since cadmium has been outlawed here for some time. It should "bling up" the engine bay in a way that's nearly factory.