Last week I posted a quick heads up on the modern quarter-window trim on the 240s being aluminum rather than stainless steel as is the rest of it. Which, for those of us undertaking various degrees of retro-ation projects, means that to remove the paint and polish the underlying metal will leave us with poorly matched window trim. I came up with a few solutions - Rob, maybe your dealer-buddy could get some ideas.

As I see it, there are two main, practical ways to make the window trim match along the entire length of the 240 - 1) make the aluminum look like stainless or 2) make stainless pieces to replace the aluminum.

1) Making the aluminum merely look like stainless steel, practically, affordably, could be accomplished in a couple ways. The best ideas I had were to either use thin stainless flashing epoxied to the surface of the aluminum or with nickel plating. The flashing idea, while feasable, would not look very good in my opinion so I did not even entertain the idea for long and instead thought about the plating.

Nickel plating can be accomplished on aluminum once the oxide layer is gone and the best way to do that is with a zincate coating. The zincate solution will eat off the Al oxide and leave a Zn-based protective coating. Immersion in a plating bath will then quickly dissolve the zinc, leaving only pure Al exposed.

Further, electroless nickel plating - on a polished part - is said to produce a coating of nickel thicker, harder, and smoother than electro-plating can accomplish, with little to no finishing required. www.caswellplating.com sells some small electroless nickel kits for reasonable prices (about $100 for everything you'd need) and they also sell the zincate coating ($10-$20).

Why nickel? Because real chrome plating is out of the question - due to EPA regulations of the industry and the labor involved, chrome plating is exremely expensive, dangerous, and just down-right hard to source. Nickel however is relatively cheap, easy to do and should match the stainless fairly well once polished - stainless steels usually have a slightly "warm" tone to them anyway, given that most of them contain a good deal of nickel.

So if I were to use the original trim pieces, I would invest in an electroless nickel plating kit and plate them to closely match.

2) Making stainless pieces to replace the aluminum is at the same time the cheaper and more labor intensive solution, but possibly the better. Using a piece of stainless steel - especially of a similar alloy - will have the best chances of matching the look of the rest of the window trim and requires only a little metal shaping and finishing skill.

I thought about this one the hardest. I sourced a piece of 304 stainless from McMaster-Carr for the job at about $12. But that would mean lots of careful grinding followed by the long and painfull process of polishing.

But a little inspiration hit me and I realized where I had a piece of stainless steel in the exact dimensions I desired, of the exact same alloy - I have a dozen or so window scrapers I got from the junk yard to steal their good rubber.

So what I ended up doing was taking spare window scrapers, cutting them down to size and attaching to the quarter-window trim. The exact process was lengthier - and I will detail it in minutia to anyone who wants to try it theirself - but here's a couple scaled-down, 56k friendly pics to show you how "stock" it looks:





Now, with the final piece of window trim matching the window scrapers exactly - heck, it is one - I'm satisfied. Never have to worry about polising the aluminum when it gets cloudy white, never have to worry about plating wearing off and I'll never have to worry about it rusting. Plus, I think it looks better than the original piece of trim that was there, even supposing that piece was the same metal. The original kinda bulged out and never really matched too closely. Maybe I'm just anal.

Well, thoughts? I will get some better pictures once the car is actually clean, and will post in 56k-friendly format as well as links to the pics in their full-size glory, I just don't like to crowd people's screens and bog down their modems - I recognize that not everyone yet has a 17" screen and high-speed internet.

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Sean Corron