[Chrysler300] RE: J K L emblem restoration

Mike, those are not painted, they are kiln fired enameled glass. As many of our people have asked if we are going to reproduce these as a club project and since I am a member of the parts committee, I did the research into doing these and discovered that the costs would be very prohibitive to redo these emblems , or cloisonné’ as they are sometimes called. I do however have a source for having your emblem restored to concours NOS condition. It is an interesting story about a chance meeting with an Enamellist at one of my wife’s horse shows, this woman made hat pins and brooches for the horse crowd . It just so happened that I had one of my 65 300L emblems with me out in the parking lot. So like every other good 300 guy, I always carry around extra letter car stuff with me. Anyways after retrieving it from the glove box and showing it to her I asked if she could restore it, she said no, but gave me a name of a guy in Memphis Tennessee that she thought could do the restoration. Monday morning I called him and found out that he was the supplier of the raw materials that are used to make the colored glass, or enamel that the artists use, and that they would purchase the supplies from him. He was familiar with that type of automobile emblem and told me that a lot of the old cars from the twenties and thirties used them, it fell out of use after the war. A lot of the material used in the old enamels is outlawed now as it contains lead and he is restricted to only selling the remaining stock that he has on hand. It is also very difficult to ship the materials because of the restrictions he has placed on him by the EPA and the state of California. He gave me the name of a person who he knew did that type of restoration on those style of emblems. He also stated that the person he was referring to had ordered the raw materials from him because the modern “approved” materials did not match the originals correctly. I then called Karla Maxwell in California and had a wonderful discussion with her. She owns

http://www.maxwellenamels.com/ and has a very impressive resume’ . Take a look at her web site and see some of what she has done. She gave me a lesson in how the emblem was originally made and the process she uses to restore them. She expressed a concern about the colors and hue of the material because of the supply of the original type of glass , because of the restrictions, is getting low. Please when you contact her mention that we had a dialog about the emblems, she will remember my conversation with her. If I recall she quoted me between 350 and 400 to do mine. I will also caution you to be careful buying an NOS one on eBay as some of those are take off’s that were removed back in the day and are now floating around. I bought one of those on “Evil Bay” and found that indeed it was NOS, as you could tell it was never installed because the mounting tab had no fastener marks, but the enamel was not good, and the chrome was very thin. Hope this helps you.

Jamie Hyde

Parts Committee