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Sound technical content, curated with aloha by
Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Pine Beach, NJ

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Change nickel or zinc (silver color) hardware black

June 2, 2015

Q. Hello,
I have a small company with 6 employees. We build guitar electronics and have always used black hardware on a product we call the MW1. Somehow we got thousands of these black metric panel nuts about 5 years ago and they have finally run out - I've been searching for hours but can't find anyone, anywhere, selling them.

59890

However, over the years we've collected thousands of silver colored panel nuts (nickel or zinc maybe) as they came with the potentiometers we've been buying and we swapped them for the black ones... so I have three questions:

1. How can we turn these silver colored ones to black ourselves, or
2. Can you recommend someone who can do it for us... Or,
3. Where can we buy black M9-0.75 11 mm x 2 mm hex panel nuts?

Thanks!
Alex

Alex Welti [returning]
Creation Audio Labs - Hermitage, Tennessee, USA

A. Hi Alex.

1. Getting into the metal plating business is not a small thing that you'd likely want to do for a few thousand nuts.
2. A local plating shop that does black nickel barrel plating or black zinc barrel plating (zinc plating followed by black chromate conversion coating) can strip these nuts and refinish them for you at a reasonable cost. They look like black zinc to me, but it would be best if you could figure out what they are because stripping nickel plating and refinishing in black nickel is liable to cost quite a bit more than stripping zinc plating and refinishing in black zinc.
3. Sorry, I don't have any leads that you don't have ... but another reader may.

Luck & Regards,

Ted Mooney, P.E. RET
Striving to live Aloha
finishing.com - Pine Beach, New Jersey
June 2015

June 27, 2015

Follow-up, Thanks to the Finishing.com forum... because it exists and I found it searching for a solution, I was connected to a plating shop who did an excellent job re-finishing a few thousand of these for us!

59890-2

Cheers!

Alex Welti
Creation Audio Labs - Hermitage, Tennessee, USA

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