Hiya
rdroid
I'm not sure about Alumaluster, other than I know it is pretty expensive - hahaha!
I'm presently working on a Boushh cosplay for my daughter and one of the items in this set is the Thermal Detonator. As you may or may not know it appears chrome onscreen....
(
Return of the Jedi - Screen Pic)
I recently picked up a Disney Parks Hot Potato Thermal Detonator game and am in the process of doing a conversion. Here is what I started out with......
One of the things I had to do was unsolder the white LEDS and replace them with Yellow LED's, which wasn't too difficult. But, after looking at multiple options of chrome paint, that would give off that mirror finish - I landed on Alclad II's ALC-304 "
Gloss Black Base" and Alclad II's ALC-107 "
Chrome" I only landed on this after watching this 8 min YouTube video, which I found to be somewhat informative as it put Alumaluster vs Alcald II's Chrome paint to the test:
Further investigation led me to find the some of the same things you've found out in how to go about applying chrome. First I started off by applying the Alclad II ALC-304 "
Gloss Black Base"...
After giving it 24 hours to dry/cure, I then applied the Alclad II ALC-107 "
Chrome"...
I gotta say, I was actually pretty blown away by the results! For the clear coating I opt'd to go with another Alclad II product, the ALC-310 "
Gloss Klear Kote". In my excitement I only let the Chrome cure for 6 hours, before trying the Klear Kote, which was bad on my part, because I guess you should wait about 2-3 days before applying it. But it muddled the chrome severely. I've reapplied the gloss black and chrome again to bring it back to life! Well....I've given it much longer than the recommended 2-3 days as I've still not applied it - My chrome went on February 15th, 2022. So here we are nearly a month later. I wanna get it done this weekend and will let you know how it goes.
Hope this information and my experience helps you in some small way.
Best,
-Iron