Pitted pot metal is VERY expensive to rechrome, so be sitting down when you get a quote. The plater has to strip the old chrome, hand grind out every pit, then plate the part with copper. Once that is done, every pit is hand filled with solder and ground and sanded down to fill the pit. At that point the part is again copper plated, followed by the normal nickel and chrome to finish. This is extremely labor intensive, and if the pits are in the grained area, it is nearly impossible to repair without losing the texture. It is also very time consuming to smooth the ribbed area. I had a similar problem with the grained trunklid trim for my 66 442. I eventually just had them grind the grained area flat. I will paint that section with black wrinkle paint.

 

 

If you are building a driver grade car. My advise would be repaint the black with matte black and enjoy it. No to the silver paint.

 

Compared to a lot of those 4 spd top plates, yours is in really nice condition. 4 spd consoles with chrome like that are very hard to find. Yes, it would probably be considered a pretty good rechrome candidate but it would still be expensive to do if you wanted a quality job.

As lemoldsnut suggests, you might be surprised how nice it looks with cleaning/polishing the exposed chrome areas and stripping and painting the ribbed parts. I'd do that first since it costs virtually nothing to do yourself. Of course you'd want to deal with the console plastic as well. Again, easy enough to do yourself. Why not give it a shot since the cost is cheap. If some imperfections in the exposed chrome really continue to bug you then you can always have it rechromed later.