Inexpensive black electroplate technique?

If you have to do something yourself, I'd very lightly sand them to remove most of the chromate, then paint the exposed surfaces black.

BTW, it is unlikely that the finish is nickel-cadmium, that is usually reserved for aircraft components; fasteners from Home Depot are almost surely zinc plated and chromated.

Ted Mooney, P.E. finishing.com Brick, New Jersey

Hi. I have the same sort of questions as Greg. I guess since you do not sell a kit to do this, you did not want to take more than 60 seconds to write a reply. Maybe I am wrong, but you would have been the right person it seems to figure out HOW to do this instead of why not to do this. Any jerk can spray paint their bolts. When we take pride in our engines on motorcycles and cars, building the engines ourselves, the reply you gave sounds like a cop out.

I have gone through so many cars and this one, I wanted to plate the bolts to give a cleaner appearance. I even bought brand new ones from Honda to get plated.

I guess you are right though, if it is hard to do, and I can not do it perfectly the first time, why even try.

Hi, Peter.

If you want to participate on this page, the main thing is to ask your questions or answer other people's questions without ad hominem attacks. They make the site a sour place to visit instead of a pleasant one. We've been on line for 19 years and we credit our success primarily to readers understanding the importance of civility. Plus, such comments distract from the content -- why are we wasting the readers' time talking about a hypothetical "kit" that you don't want, and that we don't sell, just to attack our integrity? It's silly.

Greg did not complain about our answer, probably because his question was "Knowing how expensive it is to have these plated 'black oxide' by a professional company . . .", and we addressed that problem by telling him that the reason they were expensive was the onesy-twosy special handling involved in rework, and that when they are manufactured in bulk they are inexpensive and specialty fastener stores have them. He asked a different question than you, and you are insulting me for answering his question instead of yours, which you hadn't posted :-)

We also advised him, as he asked us to do, that the plating was zinc not the nickel cadmium he thought it was: he can perhaps use this knowledge to pursue the blackening of the zinc, rather than being off in no man's land trying to figure out why his efforts at removing nickel cadmium plating aren't working the way the book may say.

Had he then said he wanted to remove the zinc plating and do black oxide on the bolts as a matter of pursuing a hobby, we'd have told him that dozens of threads on this site cover the removal of zinc plating, which is easily but dangerously done by immersion in muriatic acid, and that it is then possible but dangerous to do hot black oxide on the bolts on a stove top, which is also discussed at length on this site.

But if you can't get hands-on instruction, it takes quite a bit of reading to learn how to do this kind of stuff safely and successfully. Trial-and-error is okay towards learning to do it "perfect" but trial and error is not a proper approach towards doing it safely. Why do you think there are so many plating books written? Do you think it's all just superfluous junk, and the instruction can actually be given in a paragraph or two? The bottom line on all this is that it may be you, not me, who should commit to investing "more than 60 seconds". Good luck.

Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. finishing.com Brick, New Jersey

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