5/1/09

Spent most of the day going through all the bags of fasteners and culling everything out for plating. I realized that I am somewhat held up until I can get a good stock of original fasteners plated and ready to use. There's a place locally here in Raleigh that does a good job, should be able to get everything done rather quickly.

Not sure how many folks have gone through the trouble of re-plating fasteners, but as a tip, all lock washers and locking nuts were usually cadmium (S7) plated while just about all other silver-plated parts would have been zinc (S8). Zinc plating caused a slight brittleness to the piece, so anything that might curve or be under more stress would need to be something else. Zinc and Cad nearly look the same, Cad has more of a soft-silver finish though. Cad costs more to re-plate also.

In cleaning up bolts and nuts, I found a red paint mark on one of the upper control arm lock nuts. Not sure that I have ever seen this before. I have another car in the drive way built about the same time as the K convertible, so will have to check if there are marks on that car. Usually, any red checks or marks would indicate that a part had been torqued properly.



Otherwise, I removed the wire and socket from one of the original parking light assemblies I had. The Ford replacement assemblies usually never have the correct color wiring. Wasn't too hard to remove the socket, just use long needle-nose tip pliers to bend the flanges back and then pop it out. The wires cleaned up real nice. I'll be transferring this wire harness to an NOS parking light chrome housing.