Dash Panel Screws: Body Color?

They could have been raw steel if they were to be painted. Or they could have been black oxide.

Jeep would have spec'd the plain hardware if it were to be painted. Cheaper. Over enough vehicles, the pennies add up.

 

You confuse me Tim. Your first post you say zinc now you say cad?
All the ones I've had that hadn't been painted over or stripped were definitely zinc. They had the dull grayish hue and rougher finish that marks typical zinc coating. Cad tends to be smoother and shinier.
I wonder if somewhere down the line the process was changed? I'll have to look and see if I have any originals left with the zinc coat still intact.

 

I don't know for sure. I thought that the lighter colored plate was cadmium. Maybe it's zinc. Certainly galvanized zinc is darker than the plate you usually see, but I think of bright zinc plate as looking like the bright hardware you get from the bins at Home Depot. The cad is lighter and less shiny ... or maybe not.

Wikipedia says that cad plating has been mostly phased out, because of toxicity. Zinc reacts vigorously with HCl to make hydrogen gas, but that's a destructive test, and Cadmium may also react. There's got to be a way to tell them apart other than by the similar colors.

This article Welcome to TechPlate, Inc. Tooling, molds and firearms are our specialty. discusses chromate finishes, and says that effectively all zinc and cad plating is covered with chromate - blue, clear, iridescent yellow, black and olive drab.

One property that cad has that zinc does not is easy soldering. Hard to see this as a test though.

 

+1 on Tim's comments about two kinds of cad. The irridescent cad (yellow/gold) got popular in the 1980's, but the earlier brite cad plating was used in the '60s and '70s, including our original dash bolts.
Chilly's can full of bolts has the correct head pattern, but those are not correct dash bolts, at least from the mid-60's. They should not be dog-pointed, and they should have an inverse star lockwasher under the head.
-Donny

 

Theyre from a 73. And are likely original as the Jeep hadnt been messed with much. Same embossed captive washer as hood hinge bolts except 1/4-20 instead of 5/16-18.

Cad or zinc, dull silver seems to be the order of the day. Thanks guys.