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Preparing the coolant block off plate from the turbo for plating. Sanding a little to smooth the surface. CRC Evaporust then washing it, acid dip and plating with gold dip. It looks better as it dries more. At least it's now protected again.
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On tonight's episode of 'Zinc plate your GEN4 3SGTE'. Intake manifold to head hardware.
Image 1/2 prepping for cleaning.
Image 3. Stripped back to bare steel.
Image 2. Plating bath.
Image 3. Fresh out of the plating bath.
Image 4-6. 10 seconds in the gold dip. I wanted to have these as close to OEM as they would have been. The plating that was left on the unexposed sections was a light gold colour so I tried to replicate it. I think I did OK.
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Well, that didn't go to plan... For some reason these bolts refused to plate. Not even partially. Maybe it was the copper wire I used to hang them being too corroded and having a bad electrical connection. Or I didn't clean them properly or I completely forgot to acid dip them.
They looked ok when they came out of the bath although a bit more dull than expected and when I put them through the Metex IT acid solution they started to darken unlike the others that had plated. I thought it was a bit odd. Then I came back in the morning to find this, rusty bolts.
I'll redo them with a fresh copper wire starting the whole process again from the beginning.
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Bolts for the ignition coils. These seem to have paint on them from the OEM so had to remove that prior to replating. As you can see some were a bit rusty. The finish isn't the same as OEM but that's OK. Still looks really good.
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Hardware for the coolant tree plated in silver zinc. I think the OEM stuff was gold but I felt the silver would look nicer against the aluminium.
These are the parts I'll be using so they will get cleaned up with vapor blasting. I just need to figure out how to plate the rusty steel parts without plating the aluminium parts. Research is required here.
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Washing the cam gears. One had a lot of oily dirt on it due to a failed cam seal removal and installation. Turns out these aren't coated in anything and rust when water is applied. Guess what is happening next!
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These are some of the cam belt tensioner hardware. The 2 long bolts hold the hydraulic tensioner to the head, the large flange bolt holds the idler pulley and the small bolt holds the cam belt guide tab in place near the crank pulley.
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3S oil pump gear before and after. They aren't coated in anything from the factory but being under a cover they don't see the weather so stay nice. I just wanted to update it a bit to be a bit brighter and protected for another 25+ years.
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