Im restoring the steering shaft that is visible in the engine compartment. Its easy to blast and paint black but I believe there may have been a pattern of what was painted and natural steel. I have some great pictures of original cars but the rust has made it hard for me to tell what was painted and natural.
It seems that the only consistent thing is inconsistency among how they were treated. Ive included some examples: the one with the red inner fender wells is an original w30 car.
Does anybody have any good examples to compare perhaps?

 

Scrappie here is a picture from Wthirty1's post about his W31 intermediate shaft, and a pic of the shaft from my car.

I refreshed this part on my W30 and deviated slightly from the W31 example as I could find little on CO at the time to support any sort of consensus. Also, when degreased, my parts did not show the same results as those in the W31 picture which likely means someone else refreshed these parts before me. I say this, because our cars came off the assembly line within a few days of one another and should have shown the same results, but didn't.

On my project, I painted the clamp with a metal-look paint from Ewood; the coupling and lower shaft I painted black. Either paint scheme is an improvement, in my opinion.

Hope this helps and I was not too confusing with my explanation.

 

Scrappie, below is a pic from mine. I'm not the original owner, but I don't think this part has ever been refinished.


In my restoration, I deinstalled, degreased, and blasted it in my cabinet. I then refinished it with Metal Prep acid wash before Eastwood's Chassis Black, as shown below. I think it came out pretty well. But it's not OEM finish..

 

Thanks for the examples guys