After WW 2 there were tons of them sold as surplus. I used to buy them in the mid sixties from military surplus stores around Michigan. Tawas area had a huge dealer with aircraft etc.
Yep, after the war, there were surplus joints that had 55 gallon drums of AN fittings...since they were reuseable, the fittings were natural for use on a car. There were also barrels of Clecos....we used to go to a place over by Chance-Vought in Grand Prarie (about 1969) that sold Clecos for 10 cents each...they had barrels of each size. Drill bits for rivets? They had those in 55 gallon drums also. Pneumatic rivet guns were something like $2...most were worn out. Toggle switches were 10 cents. Surplus joints were really cool then.
Nope, surplus stuff was either aluminum colored or gold, probably Cad plated.....they were usually covered with lots of hydraulic fluid too. Hoses were typically black braided....no fancy stainless braid stuff.
Didnt mean you, meant the OP. "AN fittings" to many, are thought of as red/blue. I only question it from the use of "street rod".
The AN fitting was adopted during WWII, but a lot of those fittings were not the AN standard. There were AC fittings and several proprietary types and they all got thrown in barrels when the aircraft were junked. Most of the fittings sold through non-aircraft sources as AN fittings, really are not. In most cases they are really a JIC fitting dressed up to look cool like a real AN fitting, or worse, not even good enough to qual as a JIC fitting. You are ahead of the game to buy JIC fittings from hydraulic sources for the same or less as the hot rod catalogs sell the pretty fake AN fittings. Real AN fittings come in a wide variety of colors which are used to denote either the material used or on certain aircraft certain systems. They tend to be insanely expensive and for no good reason besides we-got-it-you-want-it-bend-over.
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