Restoring hardware

I am on year 5 of my 2 year project  derusting and otherwise fixing up my 1993 mx-5. I have a bunch of dirty old hardware and found that soaking in evaporust cleans most up very nicely. I am wondering if anyone has experience cleaning up hardware this way and then zinc plating the hardware sans all the wire wheel cleanup. I'm not looking for show condition just clean and protected from surface rust for a few years more than this project is taking  

thanks

If you can find a place that will clean and plate them, that will give your best longer term results. If you can find a place.....

But as much as that costs now you might be better off just to replace with new stuff. Unless they're some kind of special fastener, you can buy bulk fasteners pretty reasonably from places like Bolt Depot.

It IS a lot of work to wire brush all those bolts, and getting washers and nuts clean is impossible. I buy all new stuff now, saves tons of work and time.

Rock tumbler, vinegar, and patience. I sripped the bumper off the F-150 of all useable hardware. I find that the factory hardware is significantly higher quality that regular hardware store stuff. On top of that, the head size remains uniform. Nothing is more frustrating than having something bolted on with M8 bolts and 3 different sized heads. F-dat.

I have no experience with plating. But I definitely want to try it.

This is an everyday occurrence in my shop. 

Two prep methods we use. 

1. Sandblast the hardware to remove all the crust, rust and existing plating.  Then to the wire wheel to give it a better surface finish.  This labor takes time but gives a superior finish. Send out for electroplating.

2. Use a vibratory tumbler with green pyramid media in a slurry of water with about 2% alkaline degreaser. This will take up to two days but it happens while you are doing other things like sleeping, eating,  dancing or whatever.  The important part is that you aren't doing the work. Then sort, rinse and send out for plating. 

We are privileged to have a top quality plating shop locally who does the messy part inexpensively.  Zinc with either yellow, blue or black chromates or nickel plating.  

As with every other surface treatment the prep work defines the quality of the coating.  

As for plating at home it is totally doable.  Caswell offers a great setup but it is expensive to get started and takes quite a bit of time to do a large batch. You could pay the professionals to barrel plate a couple hundred pounds of hardware by the time you bought everything and dedicated an area of your shop to doing it. 

Do a search, I have covered what it takes a few times before. 

Arrow plating in texas did all my neon hardware in black zinc. I sent them a five gallon buckets worth and they tumbled and plated them all for me for around 200 bucks if i remember correctly. 

Dusterbd13-michael said:

Arrow plating in texas did all my neon hardware in black zinc. I sent them a five gallon buckets worth and they tumbled and plated them all for me for around 200 bucks if i remember correctly. 

Something tells me I turned you to Arrow. They're local and I have been pleased with their service for a long time and try to send them customers.

I usually take them more like a gallon bucket of hardware to replate. That's still a lot of hardware ! Since they're local and no shipping is involved it's always less than 50 bucks.

In reply to Cousin_Eddie (Forum Supporter) :

You did! And im still grateful for it.

I've got it in my head to take the power supply out of an old desktop pc and turn it into the power supply for an electrolysis tank. A little bit of setup and then 12 volts do all the hard work. The same setup can also be used for bench top plating.

I bought one of the vibratory bowls from Amazon. Cost like 80 dineros and it works amazingly well just using the play sand out of the sandblaster. Did all of the bolts on the Healey and they came out great.

Then, instead of using the nice clean bolts out of the vibratory bowl,  I replaced all of them with brand new plated grade 8 bolts for a lot of dinero cause I figured the nice rust free originals were going to be be brown in a few months. Silly game this is.