The nuts and bolts of it

The 1991 models' fasteners are nearly all zinc plated, though there is a smattering of cadmium plated fixings under the bodywork, and chrome plated mushroom-headed screws for the fairing.

The factory built its own in-house plating facility after a couple of years' production, I think for the 1993 model year. I saw it in action on a factory tour in 1995 - it really was impressive. Almost unbelievably, Triumph also decided to make a lot of its own bolts and screws too after disappointment with the quality of the fasteners on the first models. I saw huge flat bed tooling in action, for turning bar stock into fasteners, on the same visit. It was that commitment to the quality of the engineering in Triumph motorcycles that left me with my obsession with the T300s of the 1990s. It cost Triumph more than the bean counters could stomach though so later models just didn't receive the same level of attention.

Unsurprisingly then, as one of the first, the fasteners on my 1991 Trophy had not fared well. The quality of plating wasn't too good on my bike, though the steel they are made of seems pretty good. It had lifted from a few, peeling off in some cases, and corroded away on the shafts of others. The bolts that retain the left-hand aluminium casting for the pillion footrest were particularly bad. They are cadmium plated and this was not adequate to stop electrolytic corrosion through contact with the aluminium.

I could have replaced the tatty bolts with new. I'm trying to retain as much of the original machine as I can. And anyway, I'm into pain and that would have been too easy. So I decided to remove the zinc plating where it had failed and the rust where it had corroded away with a wire brush on a drill.

Bolts, machine screws and nuts after stripping off
rust and failed areas of plating with a wire wheel

Then I used anti-rust primer and then Smoothrite to fend off further problems. I mixed my own as 50:50 gold and silver (in the jam jar, to the left of the image below), as a loose approximation to a colour somewhere between cadmium plate or gold passivated zinc.

The result is certainly rust free and should be durable. I'm unsure about the colour though. If it looks wrong to me on dry assembly, I'll go over them with silver.

In the end, I'm pleased I'll be able to retain these fasteners. I shall certainly replace some of the fasteners on the bike with stainless steel, as I did with its exhaust studs. Some of the original fasteners are beyond rescue, especially the mushroom-headed fairing screws.

It does beg questions about the overall thrust of the work I'm doing on it though. Why am I doing this? It's not a concours restoration, that's for sure. It's not a customization or race preparation either. It is some kind of an attempt to breath new life into what is, in my opinion, a very special motorcycle. And to give it a future that includes a return to the roads where it was designed to be enjoyed. But there are many ways I could take this project.