Replacing Old Nuts and Bolts

Hello, I am in the process of restoring a 1970. The vet has been sitting since 1982 and has rust everywhere. I have the body off and am looking at a lot of rusted nuts and bolts. I am going to have the frame blasted and really didn't want to use the same rusted nuts and bolts to put it back together. Do they make a kit that would make it easier to replace the rusted hardware or is this going to were I take the bolts in to the dealer for sizing?

I've used this guy to replace some screws and nuts under my hood. you might want to give him a call. his name is Doc at http://www.totallystainless.com, 717-677-8811. he has a catalog too. good luck

Never seen a complete kit, but Paragon has a lot of original type fasteners available new. I buy a lot of lesser-seen bolts at Lowes; They have a great selection of grade-8 bolts and nuts.

Not the cheapest way to do things, but I've used the local GM/Chevy dealer for this kind of part, there is a dealer in the area that specializes in parts and they had everything I needed on hand. Haven't checked to see if those $25 bolts were cheaper elsewhere because frankly I don't feel like knowing how much I got ripped off. However, they've got the parts catalogs and built diagrams to make it easy to get the nuts and bolts.

Scot

Thanks for all the replies. I contacted totally stainless and they are sending me a catalog of the products. It is a little pricey but the package they had on the body bolt sounded like something worth getting. They come pre-labeled, which will help out, allot.

Hi, my name is Phil, and I sell fasteners for a living. You might want to consider something beside stainless as the are as soft as a grade 2 low carbon steel. My recomendation would be grade 8's with gr. 8 nuts to insure total fastener integrity. Won't be ncrs specs, but stainless isn.t either, so be safe, be sure and use the grade 8 products

If you have the body off have u considered blasting the original hardware and having it correctly replated?

Eastwood makes a blackening kit for the hardware that was originally black phosphated. They also make a kit for Zinc plating which I have not used so I do not know how well it works. I have used the blackening kit on the GTO I sold and it works well.

If you have a numbers matching car you may want to go this route if the hardware is not rusted beyond reason.

Hope this helps,




Bill

Thanks for the great ideas. I have called several dealers about nut and bolt kits. They are sending catalogs of different kits I can order. Phil, thanks for the tip on the grade 8, I will keep this in mind when I make my bolt selection. The rust on this car is pretty bad, even the upper body mount bolts were bad enough that I had to cut two of them off. The car isn't a numbers matching car since the block had been replaced with a 327-block form a 210 hp Camaro. So I am not bothered with the thought of making sure all the nuts and bolts are original. I am building the engine to have somewhere around 425hp so I do want the frame to be nice and sturdy.