I've finally got a set of the four outer metal cover knobs, but they look pretty crappy. The brass is worn off pretty badly exposing the underlying base metal.
I picked up a Caswell brush plating kit a while ago, but didn't get very good results. My pieces came out looking too dark and coppery.
That antenna is proper brass. The drawer pull and knob are my earlier attempts.
I decided to give it one more try before giving up. So I did some homework and altered my technique. It turns out it's supposed to look crappy right after plating. You need to really buff it out. I think I had been plating it much to heavily.
Here's my new technique.
1. Really, really clean the piece to be plated using Soft-Scrub, Brasso whatever it takes to get the base metal clean and shiny.
2. Stroke the item to be plated about 30 times with slow even strokes. Rotate a bit with each stroke with each stroke covering about 1/5 of the knob. Move the negative alligator clip occasionally.
3. Rinse with clean water and immediately buff out with Brasso.
4. ??? I haven't tried this yet, but my plan is to buff with my Dremel and coat with high gloss lacquer. I'll let you know how it goes.
Here's a pic of before cleaning, after cleaning just prior to plating and the final finish.
Here's a pic of a knob after plating but before buffing.
Finally, here's a pic of all four replated knobs
