So I have been on the lookout for an inexpensive and durable treatment for restoring nuts and bolts on my projects. The eastwood tin-zinc plating system looked good at first but if you really looked close it was pretty cheezy. batteries? really? charge a few dollars more and throw in a transformer for christsake!!

I looked into "Parkerizing" as well. I should be able to get the stuff to do it at any gun shop so that is a bonus. Problem is black bolts dont look so good on certain items.

After weeks of scouring the intarwebs gleaning any information I could I decided on a course that I wanted to test out. Zinc Electroplating. But I couldnt find a zinc anode locally....then it hit me.

So here is the experiment. Take one DC power supply. A clear plastic  container. some wire leads with alligator clips. 1 quart of vinegar, 1/4 cup salt. 1/4 cup sugar. two 99% nickel welding rods with the insulation bashed off with a hammer.

Mix the salt, sugar and vinegar together in the container. Bend two welding rods into shapes that will fit inside without touching. Wires from the power supply with alligator clips on each rod and apply voltage. At this point you are using electrolysis to dissolve the nickel into the acidic solution.



After a while the solution will turn green.  It created alot of bubbles of hydroxygen gas.



I let it go for an hour or so until the solution was pretty bright and then tried to plate. First batch was some fender bolts. I left the nickel rod on the positive lead (the anode) and attached the items to be plated to the negative lead (the cathode). Since electricity will always travel from anode to cathode it should deplete the nickel rod and deposit it onto the bolts



Results were spotty at best. I assumed sandblasting them would get them clean enough... I was pretty wrong. Next step was to wire brush a camber bolt, then soak it in the solvent tank for an hour. Out of the tank I hit it with brake clean and then acetone until I was sure it was clean. In it went for a 8 minute shot.



It still wasnt quite clean enough though. But the results are very encouraging. I just spun it on the buffer for 2 seconds and ended up with this

 

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