Factory painted undercarriage bolts? (1 Viewer)

[shishkabobs]

I'm in the middle of a light restoration of my FZJ80 and I'd like to keep everything as close to factory as possible. Many of the bolts underneath have been removed, wire wheeled and will soon be yellow zinc plated.

My question is, which bolts were painted black from the factory?

I've looked through many of the low-mile auctions on BaT and couldn't see much of a pattern emerge. On the 1k mile example shown below, most were left unpainted but some were not- the front sway bar has a couple, the transmission support bolts and a few attached to the rear axle.

What say you guys? In the absence of a consensus, am I better off painting them all or keep them zinc?

 

[Kernal]

AFAIK except for body bolts (doors, etc) that are painted at the same time as the body, Toyota doesn't paint the other bolts, they're some type of plating (?chormate, phosphate, zinc). Some had a base plating of Cadmium but I don't think Toyota uses that much anymore due to health/environmental issues.

Don't recall anyone going through the vehicle to list which bolts had which type/color of plating however. Some interior bolts (seat bolts, some under dash bolts) may be green chromate, but I'm not the expert in that area. Wait for others to chime in.

That would be an interesting project to list which bolts had which plating from the factory.

 

[WarDamnEagle]

Depends on how exact you want to be I suppose. There should be plenty of 80's out there with all the original hardware and no non-factory paint underneath (mine for one). I think you'll find a combination of yellow and silver finish along with some painted bolts.

 

[Malleus]

This is by no means intended to be authoritative, but just going by inspection from the few I've seen, it seems that the painted fasteners were those applied/installed during subassembly, prior to subassembly painting, and the plated ones were installed on the main line. I know that helps very little, but it also seems that the majority of plated fasteners were those intended to be removed, at least occasionally.

For example, the skid plate bolts under the radiator have to be removed to tension the A/C belt, so those get removed every time a belt is changed. The brakeline brackets should not be removed during normal maintenance, and coincidentally, would have been installed in axle subassembly, and are painted the same as the axle.

If it were me, I think I'd just lean toward painting anything that would not be removed during normal maintenance and plating everything that would.