On 8/18/2013 2:46 PM, Jeff Scarbrough wrote:
> Here's a question for discussion...What do you do with all the old
> nuts and bolts you collect?
I have this discussion with myself regularly. Often quite loudly.
> Do you throw them in one big coffee can? Sort them somehow? Or
> (gasp!) toss them and buy new whenever you need them?
I keep generic sizes and shapes (SAE 1/4-7/16 in size increments from
3/4 up to 3 or so, M6/M8/M10 in a smaller range of sizes) in inventory,
buy 'em from McMaster-Carr.
But...there's all kinds of oddball and interesting fasteners that come
out of things you disassemble, and it's really a PITA to sort and stock
all those things.
They all go into gallon-size buckets my wife brings home from work (the
gallon size were usually olives or salad dressing, the five-gallon ones
pickles) and get sorted when the stack of olive buckets gets too tall
for me to work around.
That's one of those "it's ten PM, everyone else is in bed, get your
sorry ass out to the shop and do it" jobs.
Slightly less painful now that I've got speakers and amps and a little
Bluetooth dongle wired up in the garage and shop so I can blast my
Dollyrots and Girls From The Clouds Pandora channels while I work, but
I've still got a WHOLE LOT of those jobs stacked up.
> Been cleaning the shop today, and pondering buying one of those HF
> tumblers and polishing all my old hardware...
Most of the good factory stuff has yellow zinc or cadmium plating, or
some sort of passivating, that you don't want to knock off if you don't
have to, so watch out for polishing.
I need to come up with some sort of plating setup for various stuff, old
OE-specific nuts and bolts like the Ford 5.0 rocker-cover bolts with the
stud that sticks up for the plug-wire loom to snap onto, the airbox
snap-latches for the same application, etc.
John.
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