Your preferred finish on various suspension parts?

[82DMC12]

Looking for your experience with various paints / coatings / treatments on the different parts in the suspension system. I'm going to be doing a 100% overhaul of everything connected to the frame and only want to do this once! I know there are preferred ways to deal with different parts, so I'd love to hear what you think I should do for part groups such as:

Hardware (nuts, bolts, washers) - leaning towards sending out to get cadmium plated. I understand cad isn't super durable, but I like the gold color. What else should I consider?

Brake parts - calipers and parking brake mechanism in particular - not too picky on color but leaning towards silver. Should I just get these blasted and then hand-paint with caliper paint, or should I powder coat them? I did a car where I had all this stuff cadmium plated and it looked awesome but I don't know how durable that is with the heat long-term

Large suspension parts - upper A-arm, lower control arm, steering knuckle, roll bar, upper and lower links in the rear suspension, trailing arm, hub carrier - not sure what to do here but probably powder coat?

If you have photos of what you did and how it turned out I'd love to see it.

Making big plans!

Andy

[Josh]

I powder coat everything black.

[84Impulse]

As long as you keep it looking like a space ship. Can you use gold foil perhaps?

[Drive Stainless]

Lotus plated most of their stuff where steel was used. I also like the look.

Maybe plated with a clear powder coat to keep it looking nice would be my ideal?


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[82DMC12]

Thanks guys. Is it often an issue where something gets powder coated but it affects geometry or tolerance? Thinking about the front suspension, is OK to powdercoat the front hub? I would think you don't want to coat where the bearing goes, yeah? What about the steering knuckle?

[Josh]

Thanks guys. Is it often an issue where something gets powder coated but it affects geometry or tolerance? Thinking about the front suspension, is OK to powdercoat the front hub? I would think you don't want to coat where the bearing goes, yeah? What about the steering knuckle?

Do not powdercoat in bearing bores, threaded holes, etc. It will cause issues. The same goes for any sort of coating other than Zinc plating as it is very thin. This is why it wears off and looks bad if you drive your car with any sort of regularity.

[Mark D]

+1 for powder coating.

Mask off the inside of the rear hubs where the bearings install, and taper lock holes on the front knuckles, any threaded holes, etc. as Josh has mentioned.

You'll also need to remove any bushings or rubber/plastic parts prior to powder coat since they be destroyed by the heat. I powder coated my steering rack tube and masked off the ends, removed the pinion bushing, and reinstalled the cover plates so those would get powder coated as well.

Here's the stuff I had powder coated:


For the steering rack I masked off the inner tie-rod end joints, and actually just left the threads on the outer tie rods to be coated and just ran a tap over them to clean up after the fact. Just to clarify, the rack was completely disassembled and I only sent in the tube and the two arms for powder coating. This photo shows the parts during reassembly.





EDIT:
Here you can see the other end where the inner part was masked off



I also had the sway bar blasted and powder coated, though that's not pictured. The rest was zinc plated: (A few new parts shown in here too)

[82DMC12]

Thanks Mark, that looks great! The box with all the nuts/bolts in it - did you get those zinc plated too but without the gold finish? How long ago did you do this and how do you feel everything has held up?

Also - for stuff with threads like the spindles, you had no issue getting bearings into them, or problems with the threaded studs after plating? I'm trying to figure out how much instruction I would need to give a local plater to make sure they don't make my life hard after the job is done while I try to reassemble.