It is not galvanized. It is nickel plate and that's the way it looks. I plan on getting one of my done in black chrome. Someday....
This likely doesn't benefit the original poster but the finish on that one (and the finish on the one I own and most of the others I've seen) is not nickel. It's a standard zinc plate. And the gold tone is a yellow chromate conversion, not Iridite (Iridite is an aluminum conversion coating). That's the same basic plating/conversion process that most fastener manufacturers use. You can easily strip any zinc plating by washing the part in phosphoric acid (the primary ingredient in many wheel cleaners).
Now that's not to say that Berg never nickel plated its linkage; for all I know it could've gold plated them at one point. But I do know that nickel doesn't accept a chromate conversion. To the best of my knowledge the only color nickel can be processed into is black.
The reason Berg used (still uses?) zinc/yellow chromate is the reason I love it: it protects well when done right and it's SUPER CHEAP. When I lived behind the Orange Curtain I used to take all of my stuff to Cadillac Plating. I bet Berg did, too (it's on Struck Ave, a mile south as the crow flies from Berg's). They'd do TWO 24x24x24 boxes full of perfectly clean, freshly blasted box of steel parts for the $50 minimum (this was 10 years ago so it may cost more now). Every bracket and every part that would get chipped if painted gets zinc. I got straight silver, yellow, and blue chromate conversions done there. The company did mostly computer frames at the time but whenever I went there I saw boxes full of car and motorcycle parts.
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