I took my Cadillac Green drum project parts to the plater today for assessment and price.
His shop is a highly regarded plating business in Vancouver B.C. Canada.
I don't know much about it and he explained the process - it sounds complicated but I won't get into that here.
I brought a sample lug from the original gold plated Cadillac Green tom. He brought samples of plating out to show me. His gold plated items looked more like chrome than gold. He said the way the process works is gold takes on the 'gold' colour after aging. This is 24K gold we're talking about. His samples did not look anything like the gold plating on my 50+ year old gretsch tom.
Questions:
Is this correct - that the gold plating on the new items will look more like chrome than gold until it matures?
Has anyone here had hardware plated gold and if so what does it look like when new?
Were the old (54-58) lugs used for the Cadi Green drums back in the day of a sturdier quality than the newer era lugs?
He showed me an invoice for a small vile of the mixture he uses - it costs him over $2000 for that small vile that he puts into a salts bath to activate the plating process. The gold plated items he showed me were very nice and kind of had that gold hue to them but they sure were NOTHING like the bright yellow gold plated lug I showed him. I also had some lugs I bought off eBay that were sold/advertised as Gretsch 50's and some 60's lugs and he said the metal quality in those were not of a quality/thickness of shell as the gold one I showed him.
There is no way in my life tome the new plating on this kit is ever going to match the old Cadi Green tom I have. I'm thinking at this point it may be better, and certainly a lot cheaper, to get new chrome lugs and hoops for the Cadi Green tom to match the chrome hardware on the rest of the drums and forget about gold plating them.
