Chroming frequently asked questions

Yes. We operate a National and International chroming service. We restore work for clients from every city in the UK. We can arrange National and International shipping for you. We also have a van collection service for larger and local jobs.

Ashford chroming are specialists in restoring thousands of jobs for the general public every year. Our service is geared and designed to make sure that you don't have to deal with the problems normally associated with leaving your valuable parts with a chrome plating company. Unlike local chrome plating companies we are set-up to receive, photograph, log and track your parts from the moment they arrive through our entire process to ensure that parts don't go missing. Our staff are trained to respect that every nut, washer and bolt must be accounted for. No other chrome plating company handles as many parts as us or has a system as sophisticated as ours. This is something we are very proud of and a process that has come about through continuous development.

In addition to our standard service, we offer an express parts service. We bring our part time polishing team onto a full time schedule in order to put your work on a faster turn around. If repairs are required or if the job is a complete Cadillac we regret that we can not offer this service. We quote a 14 working day lead time, but this is provisional and can't be confirmed until your parts have landed and our workshop team have inspected the them in order to confirm the fastest time possible.

We have different turn around times for different times of the year. Our busiest time being Autumn and Winter where our turn around can be around 8 weeks, and the quietest times being through the Summer months where we aim to work at around 4 weeks. That said, we aim to be as flexible as possible to meet the needs of our customers and every job is different, but once we receive your work, you will be given a confirmation of time scale at this point.

No. For us to produce the best possible finish, we need to do the preparation. Often customers think that shot blasting parts prior to sending is a helpful start. Sadly it is not. This would add labour time to the preparation as it gives an etch which takes longer to polish away than the smooth finish created by our chemical strip. All you need to do is to dismantle the parts as far as possible (remove over riders from bumpers, remove screws and fixings from handles and racks, that sort of thing.) and get them ready to send.

We work on parts that can be decades old, and it's often the vintage parts that come up looking amazing, due to the material they were originally made of, like brass and steel which can be restored to a very high standard. New parts like light fittings, newly fabricated parts and household items can also come up beautifully as they tend not to have erosion. It is important to understand the process involved and to remember that we are not filling a car panel with filler to hide the dents. Plating is applied in microns, which is extremely thin as an application. The skill lies in the polishing and there is a fine line between polishing enough metal away to remove the erosion, but not over polishing and causing the part to split, crack or make a hole. We can heavy copper fill to help pitting issues, but this is not a guaranteed process. It is also not always obvious to know how a part will look until it has been through the complete process. Our technicians will advise you as much as possible if they encouter issues (not available on the Diy package).

Yes. We ship Nationally using an overnight tracked service, and for International shipments we offer a tracked 48 hour service.

Yes absolutley. We have many individual customers with private projects who use our services. We have a basic Diy service see our pricing plans for details.

We are based in the heart of the beautiful Kent countryside, halfway between Ashford and Maidstone. We offer a collection service all over the UK, so don't worry if you're not local to us, we will make the arrangements for collection of your parts for you, and send them back once complete.

We use Industry sized standard tanks which can accommodate large parts. Our specific measurements can be found here.