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You may have noticed the trend lately to have copper plated spring washers on all areas of restored HK's. HT and HG I'm not sure about, probably the same deal. I've been sorting my fasterners for replating and I'm yet to find one copper plated spring washer on my car. Some of them have slight signs of copper (maybe) on the exposed sides only but on top of that they're chromate passivated (Green/gold) From the glovebox to the steering box most of them are zinc plated then passivated green/gold. So WTF's going on? Well its probably a Dandenong thing. Has anyone else noticed this on their Dandenong cars? Thanks Wayne  
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My washers looked very similar to yours, greenish gold but with signs of copper colour, some more than others. Dandenong car.   Edited by user Wednesday, 26 October 2016 9:41:13 PM(UTC)
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Yeah seems there were different suppliers for different plants and different finishes on the fasterners. Bit of interesting info for the restorers 
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Side note. Has anyone used the home plating kits ?
Seems like a good thing. Jane kits I think they are called.
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Alright well since I opened that can of worms I did an experiment. I dumped all of my spring washers into a container of phosphoric acid expecting it to fizz and bubble away all the zinc but NOTHING happened. So that tells me theres no zinc on any of my spring washers. The green on the outer surfaces turned black and was easily wiped off to show . . . . COPPER! Its a very thin almost transparent layer of copper over the top of nickel, the nickel is the base. Rub it for a few seconds and the copper is gone. So I guess the green/gold/purple that looked exactly like a passivate zinc coating was just copper oxide maybe? 
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Are you sure they are zinc and not nickel cadmium? Normally I thought you used hydrochloric acid to remove zinc (when soldering etc hydrochloric acid removes galvanising). I am thinking phosphoric acid would not remove zinc.
I am no scientist though.
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Originally Posted by: wbute  Are you sure they are zinc and not nickel cadmium? Normally I thought you used hydrochloric acid to remove zinc (when soldering etc hydrochloric acid removes galvanising). I am thinking phosphoric acid would not remove zinc.
I am no scientist though. I've been removing all my silver zinc plating using phosphoric acid (rust converter), it instantly bubbles like crazy and leaves clean bare metal after only a few minutes. My spring washers didnt react at all so no they're not zinc plated, they're electroless nickel plated then an extremely thin layer of copper.
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Thanks Google
"Zinc reacts with phosphoric acid to form zinc phosphate and hydrogen gas"
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