seriously buy the reproduction parts, do not even bother anything else.
re-chroming is insanely expensive and frustrating, trust me i did it once never again.
in addition to what OMS has done, i also tried Bare Metal Foil, and Adcad II paint, all garbage.
when the repop stuff came out i snapped it up, best money spent ever.
the repops have some slight issues but you can work with them.
some tips:
1) If you drive the screws into the plastic posts on the repops, you will crack the plastic, it is delicate to stress.
with the dash panel piece sitting on the workbench
take a soldering iron heat it up fully. place a screw into a post so it just holds it. put the soldering iron on top of the screw, heat the sucker up until the plastic starts to melt and smoke, now fast take a screw driver and start screwing the screw in. the heat will melt as the screw goes in and there will be no stress on the plastic and it will carve out threads in the posts. You will have to do this for all the screw posts, that hold instruments, AC vents, the screws for the glove box panel (deluxe dash)etc....
2) the glove box surround repop has an issue with the 4 blind nuts that hold the panel to the dash frame. the studs are thinner then the original. What happens is the original blind nut hardware will not fit, they will be too big and not hold onto the studs at all. Go to Lowes they have a auto hardware section with blind nuts. Find a set of slightly smaller blind nuts then original, this solves the issue.
3) some of the early repops didn't have the center hole drilled in the lip of the panel. so you have to check to see if you need to drill more holes.
4) touch up paint, my panels were a little lightly painted on the edges and the chrome didn't look straight on the trim line i had to use some Semi gloss, black paint to touch it up.
