Did a bit more disassembly and clean up.
And, I had a go at cleaning up the heads of some 1/4-28 stainless bolts.
Here are the results.
I should have placed them on a white cloth to snap the picture. They're not gold colored!
Before and after.
The process requires three steps.
1. Rough sand with a belt sander.
2. Fine sand with 320 grit wet drum sander.
3. Polish with tripoli polishing compound on a cloth wheel.
It goes pretty fast. I took about 1/2 hour to do 24 of these.
I think I'm going to have to bead blast them after polishing. This is too shiny. They won't look enough like the original Enfield stuff I need to use for places where bolts screw into threaded holes. I think after bead blasting, these should be pretty close to the appearance of cadmium plated bolts.
Like to see the results of the bead blasting the polished finish, looking at going that route myself on the fasteners.
ReplyDeleteOn regular steel you can simply clean up the nuts and bolts, blue them with gun blue, then heat them with a blow torch, and quench which gives a nice hard blued finish. Then paint the nuts and bolts with silver/aluminum paint, then blow torch the paint lightly, so it does not burn. When done correctly the original fasteners look great with similar looks and surface wear characteristics similar to cadmium plate. But the foregoing is a very time-consuming process.
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