I'm looking at restoring the leaf springs for my T/A project and ran into a couple questions.
First off to confirm, the leaves are natural metal finish, not painted black, correct?
How can one restore bare metal suspension components without incorrectly painting them with cast iron paint (this will be a garaged show car never to be driven in rain).
I checked ECS and Resto Rick's websites to see if they sold a preservative oil product for this purpose but didn't see anything listed.
Any advice on the trick to keeping things natural metal without them surface rusting immediately would be appreciated!

I soaked mine in evapo rust in a 4" corrogated grain pipe for a few days. I haven't finished putting on new clamps, etc.

Preserve with something like MP 50 or something like Cosmoline or another product called Rust Veto.

That doesn't sound too bad, thanks for the info!

PPG DX metal conditioner is good for holding off surface rust so long as the part is kept dry.

Did the T/A's have bare springs? I thought "Troy" posted pics of his low mile car and they were black with pink and green paint marks on them.

T/A / AAR springs have been found painted & bare, they may have had more than one supplier?

Go with what you find on your car.

As far as the builds go, they were not made in order, they were mixed in with other cars.

A few years ago, I met a former Hammtramck autoworker and was asking him about this; he laughed and said there was no procedure to paint the springs, they were installed bare metal...but during any type of equipment down time or slow period, their managers would have them clean up, organize and spray paint any of the parts sitting on the shelves...getting surface rust, etc... This would apply to more than just the springs of course, but he said that if the leaf springs were just sitting on the shelf acquiring surface rust after a week or two...they would get spray painted black when the work slowed down...
That would account for body-colored paint runs over black paint, etc...

Sharkhide is a good product for preserving natural metal with no residue