Until nitride finish became more common and available, I always chose chromed bolts simply because the goo and crud didn't stick to them as good and they were easier to clean, as well as being slightly more reliable because they ran better dirty than parkerized bolts that the crud stuck to more easily.
And chrome just plain looked cool.
But, as Ron Smith at Smith Enterprises once explained to me, chromed bolts have 2 potential ways to bite you in the butt if your source for them is not an experienced and responsible producer;...
1. Proper bolts should ALWAYS pass Magnetic Particle Inspection (MPI) looking for microscopic cracks and flaws that are not always visible to plain optical inspection. An unscrupulous supplier might have bolts that have failed MPI but appear optically to be just fine, and decides to sell them off as serviceable. (I have had 2 such bolts break in half at the at the cam pin hole back when I used to select kit parts based on price alone.) Often such a turd will have them chromed to further disguise that they are sub-par.
2. Also, even if bolts sent out for chroming are fine when they arrive at the plater, some shops trying to be as efficient as possible will use HUGE plating tanks, dunking hundreds of bolt at a time to process as many as possible as quickly as possible. However, temperature is difficult to keep uniform throughout all the volume of such large tanks, and bolts in the center of the rack may stay within proper temperature during the process, while those on the outer part of the dunk rack closer to the edges might not. Thus, bolts that did not receive proper temp during the process can wear the chrome off and begin to flake. And there is no visual inspection that can tell you one from the other. The U.S. looked into chroming bolts and carriers to help resolve reliability issues during VietNam. They discovered this same problem. The solution was to process the bolts in smaller batches using smaller tanks to better regulate temp for quality control. But it was uneconomical and raised cost too much, so that improvement was abandoned. Typical.
And so, while I am not opposed to chrome bolts, I would only buy one from a very reputable source who has supplied them for years without many complaints, and who can talk to you intelligently about exactly where and how they have sourced their bolts. Young manufacturing and Smith Enterprises are 2 that I trust.
