January
- March 2002
I haven't decided whether restoring hardware items such
as bolts, screws, brackets, etc. is worth all of the effort or
not. Maybe I'm just at the stage where I'm getting a little
burned out. I've spent nearly all my free time for the last 6
month's working on Maych's restoration. I did
take a break for a couple of weeks around Christmas to help my
grandson build an n scale model train layout. I have restored
quite a few items, but I still have a whole "bucket of
bolts" (so to speak) left to do. The items left are all of
the bolts, nuts, etc. used to attach the front outer and inner
fenders. These have been sitting in the basement for a
couple of weeks now and I haven't yet found enough enthusiasm to get
started on them. I'm thinking right now that I may just buy all new
bolts, nuts, and whatever that will be needed to re-install the
fenders. I still have a couple of months before we'll need them,
so maybe I'll change my mind before then.
The problem with restoring these
items is that it's so time consuming. Plating or painting
doesn't take all that long, but getting them ready is a real
pain. A wire wheel on the bench grinder does a good job of
cleaning up the rust, but the pieces are small and there's lots of
them, so it takes a long time.
The first item I restored using
these new toys were the door striker plates and the associated
hardware. I debated on whether to blacken the strikers or tin
zinc plate them. It appeared that they were originally black,
but they looked more like they were painted rather than chemically
blackened, so I wasn't sure if they had been repainted at some time or
not. While cruising on the internet, I ran across a site
describing the restoration of a 72 chevy pickup and they had zinc
plated the strikers. They said zinc plating was what was
originally used and the photos of the strikers installed on the pickup
looked really sharp, so I decided to zinc plate mine.
Of course, before I could plate the
strikers I had to get them down to bare metal. I've discovered
from experience that the items to be plated must be absolutely clean -
no rust, no oil, no grease, no paint, no nothing - just bright, shiny
metal. The majority of the strikers and mounting hardware
cleaned up using a wire wheel on the bench grinder, but there were
lots of areas that couldn't be reached with the wire wheel, so they
had to be done with a variety of attachments (grinder, wire brush,
sand paper, etc.) on a Dremmel. Once all of the rust and
paint were off, I wiped them down a couple of times with lacquer
thinner and I was then very careful to not touch them with bare hands
before I plated them.
To tin zinc plate an item, you
immerse the item and a zinc anode in an electrolyte solution.
This solution contains sulfuric acid, so it's best to wear rubber
gloves and old clothes. You then
attach the positive lead from a battery pack to the anode and the
negative lead to the item. How much time you leave the item in
the solution varies by size and how many items you place in the
solution at one time, but it's usually 10 minutes or less. After
the item is plated, you take it out of the solution and rinse it off
with water. If you attach the negative lead directly to the
item, then you have to immerse the alligator clip in the solution which will also
plate the clip. Instead, I attached an 18 gauge copper
wire to the item and then attached the negative lead to the copper
wire. This also works well to do several items at once - just
wrap the wire around each item and insert them into the solution all
at once. The only limit to the number of items you can do at one
time, is the size of the container. Of course you also have to
have enough solution to completely immerse the items.
When the items come out of the
solution they are an ugly, dull, gray color. To get them nice and
shiny, the directions say to
polish them with Autosol metal polish.
They even include a tube of the polish in the kit. However, I
did not have very good luck with the polish. It would eventually
work, but it took a lot of time and a lot of rubbing. The
directions also say that using a wire wheel is not needed and not
recommended, but I found that the wire wheel does a much better job of
polishing the plated items than does using the metal polish. As
far as I can tell using a wire wheel does no harm, so I'm not sure why
they don't recommend it. I guess if you got to aggressive, you
could remove some of the plating, but it only takes very little
pressure to polish the items, so I don't think that's a big danger.
The striker plates were too large
to completely immerse in the electrolyte solution using the plastic jar
that came with the kit so I
bought a shallow, rectangular plastic storage container at
KMart. I wasn't sure how it would hold up to the sulfuric acid,
but I've used in several times and it seems to work fine. After
I plated the strikers, I also plated the associated hardware - backing
plates, bolts, star washers, and shims.
The next items I plated where the
bolts, nuts, and washers that
bolt the bed to the pickup. You can see in the photo how I used
the copper wire to plate all of the washers at one time. It took about
2 hours to clean and plate the 8 bolts, nuts, and washers, so if you
are the impatient type, this work is definitely not
something you would enjoy. It gets real old, real fast, but it
does a good job and the results are nice looking, as you can see in
the photo of the bolts before and after.
I'll probably do more plating in
the future when I get around to detailing the engine compartment but
for know I just wanted to get all the hardware done that would be
needed to get Maych back together when she comes
home from the paint and body shop. I've also decided to just buy
new screws for the fenders. I just don't have the time to
restore all of the old ones before they are needed.
Speaking of paint - the
next episode will chronicle how I painted the frame.
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