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Sara Tipton - Anschuetz shotgun

Frequent TTAG commenter Dyspeptic Gunsmith saw the gun above in our postĀ A Garden Gun Cultivates a Newfound FascinationĀ and answered reader questions about blueing/reblueing a gun thusly:

If the rust is very fine and there is still substantial blueing left on the gun, you might want to strip the blueing. Brownells has a product that will strip blueing and rust (Fe3O4 and Fe3O2, respectively) and not corrode the underlying steel.Ā Remove the barrel & action from the stock. Remove the bolt & trigger group ā€“ this might require a pin punch on some guns to pull the trigger group.Ā From what little I can see in the picture here . . .

it would appear these sights are drifted into dovetails. To remove them, you put the action/barrel into a sturdy vise (padded with soft jaws) and you use a piece of brass rod to drift the sights out. Youā€™ll want to clamp on the barrel directly under the sight youā€™re about to drift out. Theyā€™ll usually go in from the right, and be drifted out from the left (ie, drifting them from left to the right as the muzzle is pointed away from you).

So basically, youā€™ll want the rifle in the vise with the muzzle pointed to your left. You should put the brass drift (which you can make out of a piece of brass rod about 1/4ā€³ in diameter) on the sight base, and then start tapping the end of the drift with a small hammer. Before you start, it might do you well to mark the sight base on each side of the dovetail with a Sharpie marker, so you can see when the sight begins to move.

OK, now with the sights out and the trigger group off, you can put on the rust/blue remover on the barrel/action. Follow the instructions. You might need two applications to clean up more deeply rusted spots.

Once you strip the blue & rust, then you can see what youā€™re dealing with. If you have very light, fine pitting, you can polish this out. Youā€™ll need some shop rolls, ranging from 180 to 400 grit (typical 4-packs are 180, 240, 320 and 400 grit, in 1, 1.5 or 2ā€³. I like 1.5ā€³ wide shop cloth myself)

When polishing something like the above rifle/shotgun, youā€™ve got a pretty light coat of rust, without severe pitting. You might be able to start at 320 grit. When Iā€™m polishing on barrels, I polish lengthwise. Use a backing block of wood or even a Pink Pearl rubber eraser. Always back your paper when youā€™re polishing over edges and up against features.

Polish to at least 400 grit. If you want it smoother/shinier, you can polish up to 600 grit, with wet-or-dry paper. I use kerosene to wet my paper from 500 on up.

Hereā€™s instructions from Mark Lee Supplies on using their Express Blue #1. I used Express Blue #1 on lots of guns, where I want something less labor intensive than slow rust blueing (which I wonā€™t describe here):

Some notes:

ā€“ most steel wool isnā€™t oil-free. Itā€™s oiled in production to keep it from rusting on store shelves. You want 0000 steel wool for carding between coats. To obtain oil-free steel wool, get some acetone in a container (say, an old, clean yogurt container you were going to throw away anyway). Pour in some acetone, and while wearing rubber gloves (dishwashing gloves are OK), put in a pad of 0000 steel wool, swish it around and pull it out. Do this outside, so you can do this next part: Just whip the steel wool at armā€™s length to extract the excess acetone. Itā€™ll evaporate rather rapidly, but still, donā€™t whip it at cars or house finishes. It can soften up some paints and plastics.

Alternatively, you can press the pad of steel wool between your hands over the container of acetone, and then put it on some paper towels to dry. Itā€™ll take perhaps 20 minutes to really dry down.

ā€“ Acetone is also useful for de-greasing the barreled action. I like using acetone to strip the heavy oil on guns, because it lightens up the oils and makes them easier to strip with a water-based cleaner.

ā€“ Old school ā€˜smiths use something called ā€œwashing sodaā€ to strip oil off guns. It is slightly caustic, so be careful you donā€™t leave it on the gun for long.

ā€“ When putting water in your boil-out tank, use distilled water if you have water with high mineral content. Most waters in the Rockies clear out to the west coast will have high(er) dissolved solids in them. These minerals (often calcium and magnesium compounds) tend to result in blotchy and uneven results. Just use distilled water.

ā€“ Some people might not have a tank long enough to contain a barreled action to boil out. Brownells has steel tanks, and there are some steel/stainless long/thin tanks available from other sources.

To heat this, I use a Coleman camp stove and a 15# jug of LPG gas. you could also heat this size tank with anything from a hibatchi up to a Weber charcoal grill ā€“ or you could put it on top of a wood-burning stove or even a kitchen stove.

When youā€™re done and have neutralized & washed off the Express Blue #1 solution, you then should spray down the barrel with water-displacing oil. Fortunately, this is easily had at any hardware store: WD-40 is a water displacing product, not a lubricant (contrary to widespread advertising). Spray down the whole barreled action with copious amounts of WD-40, inside and out. Stand on end over some paper towels to drain.

If the sights need to be stripped & blued, follow the same procedure, but donā€™t polish on them. Just remove the blue/rust, degrease, dry, then blue/card/boil-out/oil/drain.

Drift the sights back in from the right side of the barrel. Hang the trigger group again, re-stock and you should be done.

Simple, right?

If your barrel has heavier pitting, now weā€™re into filing to remove pitting, and thatā€™s something I canā€™t teach people in mere text. To remove pitting and keep the barrel profile intact requires skill with a file, and that requires hands-on training.

Better than cold blueing?

Oh mas oui.Ā Express blueing, slow rust blueing, hot salt blueing, nitre blueing, carbona blueing ā€“ all are better than cold blueing.

Cold blueing is OK for touchups, at best. Cold blueing solutions usually just donā€™t wear well. You can improve your results by doing two things:

1. Do all the prep you would for express or rust blueing, especially degreasing. It is always essential to remove all oils from metals you want to blue, even if the cold blueing solution claims you donā€™t need to do so.

2. Heat the gun parts. Cold blues will react with steel at room temperature, but you get more aggressive reactions when you heat the gun to, oh, 150 to 200F.

Still, you will find that cold blues donā€™t last.

I have at least three cold blue solutions in my shop ā€“ including Oxpho-blue, 44-40 and others. I rarely use them. They have their place, but doing a whole gun with them isnā€™t that place.

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49 COMMENTS

    • That would be a hot salt blueing mix. Hot blueing is a good process, especially if you have a lot of iron to shove through the blueing process quickly. In the hot salt process, you will need, oh, four to six tanks, only one of which will be the heated blueing salts. You’ll have a hot caustic degreaser tank (about 10 minutes), then a cold rinse tank, then into the hot salts for, oh, 15 to 20 minutes, then out into the hot rinse, then into a cold running rinse tank, then into a water displacing oil tank for 20 minutes or so. Pull it out of the tank and place on a drain rack.

      Sounds simple, right?

      WRONG.

      I don’t have that much blueing to do in my shop, so I don’t use hot salts. When you’re using hot blueing salts, you’d better be on top of your game, or you can seriously injure yourself. The blueing salt bath will be at about 286 to 292F, and as it is bubbling away, it is losing water, and the boiling point of the solution keeps climbing. You need to constantly be adding in a bit of water to bring the boiling point back down into the range you need. When you add water to a hot salt tank, you get an explosion of steam, and you need to develop some skill in adding the water with a very fine copper pipe on your water hose to prevent steam blow-outs spattering salts all over you.

      If you don’t drain the barrel or action recesses properly before putting a barrel or action into a hot salt tank, then you will find out in a hell of a hurry as the water flashes to steam under the surface… and again, splatters hot, highly caustic lye/nitrite salts all over you and your shop.

      I don’t use hot salt blueing because much of my work is on older double guns, which have ribs that are soft-soldered into place. Hot blueing salts attack soft solders on guns, so it isn’t to be done on old shotguns and some older rifles. And I work alone in my shop, and lack the required (IMO) safety facilities that are needed.

      My advice to people here: Unless you’re a professional, and you’re working in a shop with all the required safety gear (a cold water shower within a couple feet of the tanks, and an eyewash station next to the tanks, and someone working in the same shop every moment you’re working on the salt tanks), DON’T. JUST DON’T.

      Don’t mess with hot salts. Just don’t do it. Even with safety glasses and a full-face shield, a rubber apron, rubber boots, etc it is possible to get salts into your eyes – and all over the rest of you. Even at room temperature, the salts are highly caustic and will eat into your eyes or skin in seconds – not minutes. Battery acid is child’s play compared to blueing salts. Add in the 250F+ temperatures of the salts when they hit your skin, and you’re both burned thermally and chemically in seconds.

      Don’t. Mess. With. Hot. Salts. Just don’t.

      • Listen to the man.

        I’ve dealt with strong acids and strong bases in lab work, and I fear the strong bases more.

        It’s the corrosive gift that just keeps on giving. (And taking, out of *your* hide)…

      • THANKS DG……. Referring to the post that started all of this;

        Dyspeptic Gunsmith says:
        February 20, 2016 at 16:12

        That surface rust on the barrel could be polished off easily. Then you can express blue it with a propane torch and a tank of boiling water. If youā€™re interested, just ask and I can provide more details.

        SO, DG; unless I missed it, I am assuming the torch is used separate from heating the tank/ container with the boiling solution.
        WHERE or when would the torch get used? I saw you reference a coleman stove and propane tank for heating solution.

        Is the torch used to heat metal ……..ONLY….with Cold bluing?
        this article statement
        2. Heat the gun parts. Cold blues will react with steel at room temperature, but you get more aggressive reactions when you heat the gun to, oh, 150 to 200F

        Thanks again for sharing your wisdom!

        • The torch comes in when you first apply the Express Blue. You have a degreased gun, and now you need to get the metal hot enough that the reaction will oxidize the steel as much as possible.

          So, you start with a clean gun, in the white, you play a propane torch over the gun to get it to the point where the blueing solution just will readily steam, but barely sizzle, and then you brush on the blueing compound.

          The tank of distilled water you heat with a camp stove, the kitchen stove (I’m not responsible for marital discord and disruptions of conjugal relations) or some other much larger heat source to a boil.

    • OK, Buffing wheels, which I’m making their own break-out response from the blueing salt issue:

      Buffing wheels are useful things in a gun shop. BUT… like so many power tools on guns, it is possible to create expensive screw-ups to fix on guns with power tools, and buffing wheels are no exception.

      The usual mistake on buffing wheels is using too coarse a compound, and then the wheel becomes quite aggressive in removing material. When you’re using polishing paper, you think that 600 grit is very fine, and it is taking you hours to polish out something to 600. Put 600 grit compound on a wheel, use a little too much pressure… and you’ll be gob-smacked at how fast it can cut material off the gun. Then you sight down the barrel and you see “dips” and “waves” in the barrel profile. One of the reasons I hand-polish up to 600 and buff only above that is that when you see one of my barrels (by holding it up to a light source, and sighting down the barrel from the muzzle at your eye to the breech out at arm’s length), you see no dips, waves, ripples, etc. It is one smoooooth profile, from one end to the other. That doesn’t happen easily or by accident. In literally 10 seconds on a buffing wheel incorrectly applied, I could screw that up to a point where it might take be eight+ hours of hand polishing to recover my prior results.

      Buffing wheels have their purpose, but they take real skill to use without making a mess of guns, starting with the selection of the wheel (there’s, oh, at least six types of buffing wheel), choice of type of compound, choice of grit of compound, choice of wheel speed (many buffers have only one speed, and there are some jobs where you really want a 3-phase motor on your buffer with a VFD to adjust the speed down from 1800 or 3600 RPM) and so on.

  1. What’s the difference between Brown Express and Blue Express?

    I’m asking because there’s a guy on YouTube recommending Brown Express first, then several layers of Blue over that. He’s claiming that method is more durable than Blue alone…

    • Browning a gun gives you a nice, even brown patina finish of red rust on a gun. You then oil or wax over the finish when you’re done. Red rust is Fe2O3, and is “incomplete” rust – it will continue allowing the surface to corrode over time – hence the oil or wax.

      “Blue” or “Black” rust is complete passivation of the steel surface – Fe3O4. It cannot rust any further. The reason why blued guns rust is that something was allowed to attack the surface blueing and get through it to new steel – or the blueing job wasn’t deep enough to complete passivate the surface from red rust. Fe3O4 requires chemicals and/or heat to push the iron to full oxidation.

  2. I’ve cut and pasted this to my notes on the cloud.
    I plan on doing this on a couple of older beaters first.

    Thanks DG!

  3. I just had my first experience rust browning a barrel. I wish this article had come out sooner, since I did not know that 0000 steel wool may have oil in it. Further, I probably would have used a coarser wet-dry to prep the raw steel (this was a kit Kentucky long rifle) rather than the 1500 grit I used.

    I used Brownell’s Plum Brown, a product that requires that the barrel be heated to 275 degrees to activate the reaction. I tried heating the barrel in sections (as Brownell’s says is ok) but did not get a very good result, being unable to get a uniform heat in any =thing approaching more than a few inches at a time. So I buffed down the barrel with steel wool and started over heating the barrel in the oven before taking it outside to add the solution (which is nitric acid). After three coats, washing and drying, the finish was not too bad, considering I was (and am) a rank amateur. I ended up with some spots where the browning did not take, and a few dull spots, most of which I was able to buff out with steel wool soaked with gun oil.

    • Oil-free steel wool is also sold by woodworking shops. Woodworkers doing furniture finishing will use 000 and 0000 wool, and they hate oil on their wool for rubbing down oil finishes.

      It costs an arm and a leg, and you can buy 0000 so cheaply at Wally World that it makes the acetone method worth your while.

    • Also, the results you indicate are typical of still having some oil on the gun.

      What I forgot to mention in all of this is a detail that seems mundane, but it critically important: Wear cotton gloves. The cotton gloves insulate your fingers from the heated barrel, and they prevent oils from your skin from getting on the raw steel.

      • I wore latex gloves, as Brownell’s recommended, but used a pot holder to handle the hot barrel, and that may have been the source. Either that or the steel wool. It had been thoroughly degreased before my first attempt, but in trying to repair a poor result, I apparently contaminated it a bit. But since this was my first project, with an inexpensive kit as a learning tool, and as I intend to do this again with a much more expensive kit, my trials and errors and your voice of experience will be very useful the next time around.

        • Oil and grease really are the enemy – because you’re trying to (literally) corrode the metal. Oil binds with the metal and prevent it from getting air/chemicals to corrode.

          The de-greasing you do directly affects the uniformity of the browning or blueing. If you’re using acetone to de-oil, don’t be afraid to do it more than once. The hot washing soda tank typically used in gunsmith shops is caustic washing soda, and if you leave the gun in long enough, you’ll start to see corrosion on the gun before you get to the blueing step. That’s how vigorously we de-grease guns before starting blueing.

          Also: Do not allow the solution to run, drip or sag. You’ll get a dark spot right there. Use hemostats to hold a cleaning patch wetted with the solution and apply in nice, long, even strokes. Don’t “scrub” the solution onto the gun, just run a patch that is not dripping wet down one complete run on the barrel/action in one smooth stroke.

          When the first patch gets really funky, then drop that in your plastic garbage container (remember, these patches have been soaked in acid solutions! Don’t just leave them on a surface that could corrode or burn), get a new patch into the hemostats, soak, wring out, and keep going.

          You will get it. My first time wasn’t a stunning success. There’s a reason why I buy up clapped-out guns and stuff where people look at me with a “WTF?! You’re a gunsmith who has a lot of nice guns! You work on nice guns! You turn up your nose at crap guns? Why do you bother with all this crap?”

          Where/how did you think I got to the point I could make nice guns? I didn’t drop outta my momma’s womb being able to do this stuff. It takes practice.

  4. If you want to blue something fast … I have a cheap hot blue method:

    Lowes stump remover:
    http://www.lowes.com/pd_188198-316-HG-66420_0__?productId=4764059
    (It’s Crystalline Potassium Nitrate – 100%) – $6.18
    http://cdn.spectrumbrands.com/~/media/Spectracide/Files/MSDS/SpectracideStumpRemoverGranulesSDSApr15.ashx

    Degrease and heat the items to be blued in a steel pan to about 700F. The potassium nitrate will liquefy at around this temperature and blue your items at a relatively quick speed.

    A few safety items:
    *Potassium Nitrate is an oxidizer. Drop a piece of hot charcoal in it and it will burn in the absence of any atmosphere as the nitrate provides the oxygen for the reaction. Don’t want to get any of the liquid on you – its 700F. Think big scars. Hopefully these concepts suggest caution and diligence for what you are doing.

    *700F is very close to the heat treatment temperature of some steels. You don’t want to affect the hardness of your steel in critical areas like actions, bolts, bolt lugs, barrels, chambers, etc. I wouldn’t use this bluing method for these items.

    Alternatively. You can make a Caustic Soda – KNO3 – water bath:

    Via Linstrum:

    65% Lye (aka sodium hydroxide)
    35% Potassium nitrate (aka saltpeter)

    http://castboolits.gunloads.com/archive/index.php/t-36054.html

    Both ingredients are super cheap. (NaOH from Ebay – soap supplies).

    Safety notes: Don’t use an aluminum pan. NaOH will quickly and completely dissolve aluminum. Ventilation is important. Also – Don’t get the 275-300F bath on you. Don’t pour water in to your bath! It will instantly vaporize into steam and splash all over you. Use ice cubes. Hot NaOH is so alkaline it is great as dissolving organic materials. Think big scars. Hopefully these concepts suggest caution and diligence for what you are doing.

    • There’s a reason I didn’t pursue a career in chemistry…

      Seriously, this is interesting and thank you for posting it, but I hope to never be in a position where I need to use either of these techniques!

        • There’s nothing “wrong” with your method, but is is very hazardous, especially to people who have never done anything like it before.

          I’ve hot salt blued guns in a shop with the proper equipment and you can shove a river of iron through a single hot salt tank in an afternoon. The downsides are:

          – the safety issue, which I laid out above, and which you’ve made clear.
          – the cost of all the tanks you need for rinse & boil-out
          – the cost of the burners or heaters to heat up all these tanks – really only practical if you have natural gas available
          – it takes a long time to heat up a long (ie barreled action length) tank that is, oh, three barrels wide. I’m talking like 90+ minutes to heat the salt bath to 285F. The salts will be a gooey caustic mess while they’re cold, and you MUST have covers on the tank when you’re not using them, or the salts will “climb” over the edges of the tank and make a mess on the floor.
          – You need to adjust the boiling point of the salts for your altitude.

          It’s a good process for processing lots of guns, but I simply cannot recommend it for people who just want to do a “gun here or a gun there.”

    • Are you sure you want to heat the steel to 700F in that early step?

      The reason I ask is that when you heat steel that is “in the white” to 600F, you get a brilliant blue all on its own. You wouldn’t need salts. Heating white, degreased steel to 550 to 600F results in brilliant colors.

      On another thread, we can go into nitre blueing, which is basically heating pins/screws/bits/bobs to 600F in a molten salt bath. Brilliant blues.

      (Head slap)

      DUH! That’s me, not you.

      You are nitre blueing here. You’re just using stump remover to do it. Sorry for the misunderstanding. Mea culpa.

      Your 700F temp is too high, IMO. You want to be in the range of 600 to 650F. At 700, you start losing your blues and the steel starts becoming a wispy silvery-blue, not a dark brilliant blue.

      This is as deadly as the lye-based hot salts, but more for the temperature of a large batch of salts. The salts here will be slightly less corrosive (ie, just the pure KNO3, no lye), but at 600F, you have a big physical risk right in front of you. Your tanks better be tight, your stands for the tanks better be rigid, you’d better have top-of-the-line fire extinguishers (NB the plural) available to you. Spilling salts at this temperature will instantly result in fire, because the KNO3 is a powerful oxidizer all on its own, and the added thermal energy will light anything on fire all alone. Add the two together and you have what is akin to rocket fuel in your face – a way of oxidizing almost any organic material with insufficient water for cooling into a furious flame.

      • I pulled the temp off the top of my head. The melting point for KNO3 is 633F. It is hazardous. If you drop a piece of paper in there, or hydrocarbon compounds (like oil or grease on your part). You risk a big fire that is self sustaining by the reaction itself.

        Here is a video by Clevinger Customs illustrating it:

        • I use the Brownells nitre blueing salts, which are a combination of sodium nitrite, sodium nitrate, and potassium nitrate. They melt at, oh, somewhere about 280F. I can then get the temp to be 600F spot-on in a lead melting pot.

  5. I’ll be saving this for the future. Never know when it will come in handy. My current rifle builds are going to be parkerzied. I’ll be buying the stainless tubs and chemicals to do it and go for as close to black as I can get. I like parkerization on some of my milsurps. It’s durable and wears well. It also looks good on AK type weapons of which I have three to park.

    • I’ll go into parkerization later this week. If you haven’t done it before, wait until I mention some items about it. It’s a good process, but it isn’t a 1:1 replacement for blueing. You MUST plug your barrels, gas cylinders, remove your pistons, etc. I’ll detail why.

      Gotta go folks, I have a class to teach.

      • I wasn’t planning on doing it for a few months. I have to finish my M76 and Galil first and buy the materials. I’ll wait for and look forward to your article!

  6. Thank you for the lesson.

    I learned something slightly different than what you are teaching and that is I am willing to pay people like you to do this kind of stuff for me.

    While I am certain that I could do it myself, you already have all the bits and parts and stuff so it is worth my dollars to buy a gunsmiths time to have this done for me.

  7. Heating up a tank on the kitchen stove. I can see my wife walking in and shaking her head…about as vigorously as when I asked if I could use the dishwasher to clean some tools.

  8. DG thank you. Interesting and informative as always. They should send you a stipend for your time. A couple bottles of aged bourbon minimum.

  9. Also thanks DG! I have done a cold blue on a very rusted .22 for a friend. It was left in a flannel gun case in the back of a moist closet for 25+ years. I had to sand and restain the stock, and sanded the barrel from 120 down to 400 grit the pitting was so bad. The inside barrel was saved by the fact it was so full of lead fouling. By the time I was done it looked like it was a beat up 5 year old gun rather than a 1930’s bolt .22 that came from a scrap yard. I wish I had known more about the process, heating (I was working outside on a 60 degree day) I may have to check with my friend to see if it needs reblued again, Im sure he never shot it.

    • This is a great time to point out that leaving guns in gun cases, especially the woolen/fleece cases, in the back of a closet, is one of the most sure-fire ways to rust the value completely out of a gun. Any gun.

      • So As one newish to refined firearms ownership, what is the best way to store and protect a pistol or rifle from rusting, especially in areas like Oregon or Washington, Silicon socks, or ?
        And then there is the difference between general care and storage vs available daily carried protection pistols living in a some sort of Holster (nylon or leather) , good, bad, take them out or leave them in?

        I have always wondered about storage in gun soft cases or the foamed Hard cases, and humid or dry, heat and cold. Not blessed with a climate controlled safe.

        • My dad keeps his in a big safe with large desiccant packs that he threw in there. You can make your own desiccant packs with kitty litter (I would recommend the unused variety). It’s much cheaper anyways. Alternatively, You could store them in a hard case (like a pelican with a purge) and throw some desiccant packs in there as well.

        • kitty litter (I would recommend the unused variety).

          Dang it all. That seems wasteful. It’s nice when something can be re-used a time or two, especially when used in diversified ways. I guess I’ll have to just be happy drying toilet paper.

        • You should keep guns in a safe, if you can. If you can’t, just get them out of the case and allow air to circulate around them. Wipe them down with WD-40 on a regular basis. WD-40, as mentioned earlier, is a water-displacing oil compound – not a penetrating lube, and for preventing rust, WD-40 actually works pretty well, but it doesn’t last like cosmoline or waxy oils used for long-term rust prevention.

  10. Please be careful with the cold bluing solutions. Not every manufacturer puts bittering agents in the solution and as one poison control nurse told me: “(t)here is nothing you can do and it ain’t the good death.”

    • Gee, I’m thinkin’ Duro or cero coat maybe even Krylon might be a good enough………..
      I can keep a Krylon can always handy for touch-ups.

      But nothing like a deep Blued firearm!

      • There’s nothing I see as super-dangerous about blueing other than trying to do hot salt blueing without all the correct safety equipment and precautions. Because so many people are trying to do this sort of thing on the cheap, that’s when I start thundering in my warnings about safety.

        I’ve gotten hot blue salts on me – splashed into my hair. I handed a buddy my wallet and cell phone, and stepped under the safety shower and got wet. There wasn’t a whole lot of pain just yet – until my buddy took the safety bottle of vinegar solution used to neutralize the alkaline NaOH salts, and then the pain was there. Holy crap, did that reaction hurt like hell.

        That said, here’s the truth: The best blueing you can have on a gun is simple, safe to do, but takes a long time. It is slow rust blueing. Gun companies don’t/won’t do it because they want to make quick money, and today it’s all phosphates and bake-on appliance paint (you didn’t think a guy who calls Glocks cheez-whiz was going to sing the praises of Duracote or Cerakote, did you?”). Slow rust blueing can take a week or more to accomplish, but it is a durable blue job like no other.

        RF: Expect a write-up from me on Rust blueing and parkerizing in the next couple of weeks.

    • Very true. Most cold blueing agents contain some selenium dioxide in them to enable to them to react at room temps.

      It is not nice stuff. Wear disposable nitrile gloves, work in adequate ventilation, bag and dispose of all rags/towels used in the process in their own bags, and quickly. Don’t leave cold blue solutions around anywhere pets or kids could get at them.

  11. I hope to someday have good knowledge to pass on to people, heh. Thanks for always being so willing to share, Sir. It is vastly appreciated even by those of us who will probably never use it.

  12. And for the next (after the next) installment, how to do hard case coloring….
    Great column, and thanks for all the responses to various questions and comments. I’ve learned a LOT.

  13. Thank you so much for sharing such a great article. It greatly helped me to learn how to blue a gun perfectly at home. Keep posting like this. This works well for me. Thanks a lot for sharing.

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