I've been anxious to get going on assembly, but first I had to get all the fasteners restored. The first batch was all the black stuff.
Each baggie was emptied into my basket. If the threads looked really dirty or damages I chased them with a tap or die. Then I put them into the cabinet and blasted them with Aluminum Oxide. I held each bolt or nut in a pair of pliers to protect the gloves.
After blasting, I photograph them on a piece of paper to record what goes where. Here is a sample picture of just one baggie. I took approximately 100 pictures just like this.
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Since the plater had a minimum charge for anything up to 180 lbs, I cleaned and plated all the bolts from a couple of parts cars, plus bolts I've collected over the years.
That was going way to slow, so I tried a different approach. For all the spares and parts car bolts I put the bolts into my cement mixer with a mix of sand, water, and degreaser and ran the mixer for 5 hours.
Here's what they looked like before.
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Here's how they came out of the mixer.
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Here's what they look like after rinsing.
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Since the process was kind of rough on them, I chased all the threads with tap and die and then put them in the sandblaster. Since they were pretty clean from the mixer, it was way quicker to blast them. All together I had about 4 gallons in a 5 gallon bucket.
I took them to AllBlack in Santa Fe Springs, CA. They offer at least three different black plating processes. The cheapest was black oxide. The most expensive was manganese phosphate. I chose the middle option which was zinc phosphate. He quoted me a minimum charge of $90, but since they were so clean he discounted the job to $75. I dropped them off before noon and they were ready in 4 hours.
Here's the finished product. They've been soaked in oil which supposedly soaks into the zinc phosphate and protects them.
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I can't say enough good things about AllBlack. Not only can they do the plating, but they can do the prep as well. They have special automated blasting cabinets with tumblers as well as giant vibratory tumblers. I asked the guy how much it would have cost to have them to all the prep. He guessed it would have cost around $40 which would have been such a bargain given the time I spent.
