66 Update

Good news on the 66 front! There's going to be a decal source soon which has renewed my interest in the project. I ordered the electroless nickel plating kit from Caswell and now I have just about all I need to get the show on the road. The kit looks extremely complicated.

 

It came with a custom printed manual an inch thick, and two little stockpots. You have to make all these calculations about the area of the piece being plated and how much nickel in the bath is being consumed so you can replenish it as it is depleted. Looks like a job for a weekend.

Quite some time ago, I started painting the head black, but I used a brush because I wanted to build up a thick coat like the original Japanning and then spray on some thinner ones. Considering how much sanding is required to remove the brush strokes, I'll probably be back down to the primer when I'm done. Perhaps it wasn't the best decision.

The next steps are to finish sanding the head and prep the metal parts for plating. Shiny ones like the throat plate will need to have a mirror finish if they are to look anything like they used to. I could just buy new ones, but that conflicts with the original plan of only replacing parts that I can't restore sufficiently, like the etched chrome covers. I especially want to save the slide cover because it has patent dates stamped on it, all before 1910. The goal was to do this cheaply, but I don't know if that's going to be feasible. I figured the cost of the plating kit would be lower than buying all the parts piecemeal.

I showed the handwheel in an earlier post. It still looks the same. Since the plating process is finicky about absolute cleanliness of the metal, I may be able to only plate the outside diameter and leave the spoked part for painting. I don't really want to buy another one, as it has the potential to be very expensive for this budget.

Let's recap the spending so far: we were up to $82 and the plating kit was another 80. That makes $162 and hopefully there won't be much more to buy. I'm using a lot of supplies that I already had, like black paint. However, I did buy supplies to do a hand crank conversion since I used the treadle table on the 306: $45 for a handmade wooden base that will have to be stained, and $12 for a hand crank. I'm basing my budget on machines for sale on ebay, which are often in rough shape and sold with no base or table, yet still have high prices.