Painting over *chrome* plated parts?

The paint won't stick very well to the chrome.  The best bet is to strip them in some bleach or amonia.  Let the chrome parts soak overnight in either chemical and it will be dissolved away back to clean plastic.  Wash them off with some soap and water, and you are good to go for painting.

I find that acrylic paint works much better than enamel for painting over chrome.

Thanks!  I soaked the wheels in some bleach, and the chrome was dissolved in an hour!  There seems to be some kind of yellowish-clear coating on the plastic still....I wonder if that is some sort of surface prep they coat it with to help the chrome stick...and I wonder if it's okay to paint over it, or if I need to get that off, too?

I hardly ever use enamels anymore...so I'm glad to know that acrylics work better for overcoating chrome!

That's the lacquer; bleach alone doesn't remove it, just the shiny stuff. I often use Easy Off oven cleaner to remove chrome. Just liberally coat the parts in a zip lock bag and let sit over night. Scrub clean with an old toothbrush. Wear rubber dishwashing gloves because the lye in the cleaner is caustic.

You can also spray dullcote on the chrome. Gives it a dull aluminum look.

Glenn

Just tried the Easy Off oven cleaner and it didnt even need to let it sit over night. 15 minutes and a toothbrush and I was ready to go.

Be sure to get all traces of that Easy Off washed away or your paint will mysteriously flake off sometime down the road.

I usually use what Glen does.  Dullcoat makes the chrome coating look like aluminum.

However, if I do want to paint chrome, I have had no problems. I use a good primer like Krylon, and have never had adhesion problems over primed chrome (actually a thin coating of aluminum).

As mentioned above, I use Easy-Off for stripping chrome (and paint).  The chrome usually "dissolves" in less than 5 minutes and tougher (thicker) areas are easily remedied with the old toothbrush that Rob mentioned. A cheap solution that many people already have on-hand.

I have a question I have some chrome plated parts in my 68 Corvette kit that they ask to tint some of the parts of the engine gold. any idea how to do this?

Another post resurrected!  Hallelujia!

To your question-are those parts chromed?  I would strip them as was discussed above, and then paint them with a gold metallic.  If they're not chromed, of course, you can skip the step to strip them.

I stripped the chrome from the chromed sprues in the old Monogram Red Baron hot rod, by the way, because I wanted to be able to clean up seams and sprue gates on chromed parts (eg, the fuel tank, the helmet roof).  I used the automotive degreaser SuperClean to do that.  I put the sprues in a glass dish and filled it with SC.  It dissolved the chrome in about two minutes.  It left the parts literally squeaky clean, no chrome and no grease on them.  I handled them like any other parts, but sanded and polished them when it came to painting.  I used Krylon chrome to paint them again.

Hope that helps!

Best regards,

Brad

OK, then as I described, I'd remove the chrome and paint then with a gold metallic.