Van Nuys Plating

Excellent Work all around! I always have the pleasure of dealing with Linda, The owner who is extremely knowledgeable on all types of plating and what will work the best for our projects. I have had several batches of show Chrome plating and many more batches of Nickel Plating done for our Jaguar restoration jobs. The results are the best we have seen in 35 years of business, and our dealings with Van Nuys Plating is always pleasant and easy going. We were originally introduced to Van Nuys through one of our business associates who has been using them years — I am very thankful for that recommendation!

The good stuff first: these guys did a gorgeous job on my 1958 Lincoln Continental bumpers. Nice job straightening things too, as there were tweaks all over the place from 50 years of vehicular abuse. Those bumpers are huge, and made of six or eight large sections.
That said, here’s why they don’t get five stars: pot metal work. I really cannot recommend Van Nuys Plating for that. I spent literally thousands of dollars to get my pitted metal smoothed and plated (over a grand just for the two headlight surrounds!!) and much of it still had pits and/​or bubbles. A section of trunk trim came away with what looked like a hair stuck in the chrome (it wasn’t of course, it was an area where the underlying material wouldn’t allow the plating to stick), and I had to source another from a junkyard. I paid for BOTH pieces to be plated, and neither came away better than driver quality. I also needed a piece of stainless to be straightened and polished, and even supplied an example piece from the opposite side of the car. The guy doing the work accidentally REMOVED a character line from the piece that needed to be there and no one noticed. I asked to have it added back in, but it never did come out right.
These Lincolns are exemplified by crisp, sharp lines and compared to the original, that section of stainless was all rounded-​off corners and indistinct lines.
I also had issues with wait times, often waiting for parts for months.
I freely admit that I brought in some pretty tragic stuff, and they cautioned me that it would be difficult to get decent results. But to have bubbles appear just a couple months after the job… well, it was a very expensive lesson. They’ll get all my bumper work from now on. But pot metal? I’m gonna cast the net a little wider next time.