bluing steel with a torch

Colour case hardening occurs when soft steels were packed in a reasonably airtight crucible in a mixture of charred leather, bone charcoal and wood charcoal. "@type": "ImageObject", I just had my first experience rust browning a barrel. You can blue heat-treated parts with no ill effects. Learn more Steel is a common durable alloy, and while most steel used in tools is already tough, you can harden it even more to prevent wear and tear. To remove pitting and keep the barrel profile intact requires skill with a file, and that requires hands-on training. I have in the past few years became more and more. Just take them from the comments he posts. The torch comes in when you first apply the Express Blue. Premium fencing blades are often offered with a blued finish. this produces better, less turbulant gas flow, which will reduce heat traces. All those materials the leather and bone the coal where sources of carbon and other trace elements. My advice to people here: Unless youre a professional, and youre 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 youre working on the salt tanks), DONT. The only way to do that is to heat it until the metal de-magnetises, quench it again, and then temper to the desired hardness. He started the site to explore the ethics, morality, business, politics, culture, technology, practice, strategy, dangers and fun of guns. 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. I guess Ill have to just be happy drying toilet paper. "image": { For the color change to be uniform you have to remove the grease, oil, paint etc or it looks blotchy. Salts. It takes practice. Always wear goggles and gloves when operating a propane blow torch. What did you use for polishing your pieces and Im guessing you polished then added the chemicals after?Thanks, Joe, Question ], I have at least three cold blue solutions in my shop including Oxpho-blue, 44-40 and others. This is often achieved without chemicals by simply heating the steel until a blue oxide film appears. Participated in the Explore Science Contest. You need to adjust the boiling point of the salts for your altitude. The color is not oxides, when steel is heated at relatively low heats (300-600 degrees Fahrenheit) it changes colors from light yellow to a deep blue, after 600 it turns back to a steel color. One can generally use the same solution to brown as to blue. I am simply trying to learn anything and everything that there is to know about it. Either that or the steel wool. I think DGs method is a lot safer than mine. Mark the sharpened edge with a crayon. Degrease and heat the items to be blued in a steel pan to about 700F. A couple bottles of aged bourbon minimum. NaOH will quickly and completely dissolve aluminum. If you are referring to torch bluing, the 3 years ago Your tanks better be tight, your stands for the tanks better be rigid, youd better have top-of-the-line fire extinguishers (NB the plural) available to you. These work by depositing a coating of copper selenide on the surface. Once you see it turn golden, the process has started and colours will change fairly quickly! }. Theres a reason why I buy up clapped-out guns and stuff where people look at me with a WTF?! Add in the 250F+ temperatures of the salts when they hit your skin, and youre both burned thermally and chemically in seconds. Oil and grease really are the enemy because youre trying to (literally) corrode the metal. Itll evaporate rather rapidly, but still, dont whip it at cars or house finishes. Bluing is also used for providing coloring for steel parts of fine clocks and other fine metalwork. I wouldn't recommend either. You turn up your nose at crap guns? 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 ? 2023 All Rights Reserved by Shooting Mystery. ")You're ABSOLUTELY right. Its for mild steel, which must be greased, oiled or otherwise coated with something to stop it from rusting almost immediately. The wire is extremely small in diameter, so you have to take that into consideration. fascinated with blacksmithing, but have not had an income to even get it started. When Im polishing on barrels, I polish lengthwise. High temperatures and dangerous chemicals mean that a moment of carelessness can make you pay a heavy price. If your barrel has heavier pitting, now were into filing to remove pitting, and thats something I cant teach people in mere text. As mentioned, cold bluing can be done at room temperature with decent results. Being prepared is important if you can not measure the temp. 1/16-inch pivot wire has a circumference of ~0.2in. Because so many people are trying to do this sort of thing on the cheap, thats when I start thundering in my warnings about safety. WHERE or when would the torch get used? However, there are certain characteristics differences between the materials so knowing clearly how to blue stainless steel is really important. You can make a Caustic Soda KNO3 water bath: 65% Lye (aka sodium hydroxide) Heat the area you'd like to drill just until it starts to glow red, then allow it to cool slowly. With. Hot bluing should never be attempted on aluminium, as it reacts it usually dissolves in the caustic salt bath. NaOH is nasty stuff. Thermal Bluing - The Process of Heat Treating Watch Hands 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. DIY Gun Bluing "headline": "How to Blue Stainless Steel in 5 Easy Steps: Complete Guide", The part you want to place in the receiving part is cold often just placed in a freezer for a few hours. Submerge in water and scrape edge. Thats how vigorously we de-grease guns before starting blueing. I now want to reverse the process so I can drill and tap the metal tip. If youre using acetone to de-oil, dont be afraid to do it more than once. Prepare the components of the metal surface before you attempt to blue using your tools. Blue This is a great source that you can learn lots of information from and I'll advise it to to a handfuls of others. Cold blues will Whats the difference between Brown Express and Blue Express? Quenching the steel rapidly cools it so the alloys inside harden together. "@type": "ImageObject", Bear in mind not to touch the walls of your container as you don't want to disturb the process of what's happening! Reply "sameAs": Different colors can be achieved through variations of this method including quenching in oil instead of water. In the nitre bluing process, polished and cleaned steel parts are immersed in a bath of molten saltstypically potassium nitrate and sodium nitrate (sometimes with 9.4 grams (0.33oz) of manganese dioxide per pound of total nitrate). February 20, 2016 at 16:12. It is usually inadvisable to use cold bluing as a touch-up where friction is present. Also remember, by adjusting the heat you can get whatever color you want. Go on and start bluing! Keep heating the steel until you notice a blue color form on the metal. Best Gun Bluing Dont 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. These processes were later abandoned by major firearm manufacturers as it often took parts days to finish completely, and was very labor-intensive. If the magnet doesnt stick, its ready to be pulled away from the heat. How to Hot Blue Steel with a Torch- A Step-by-Step Guide Use Hot Bluing And Cold Bluing To Give Your Steel That For modern uses of black oxide, see, Learn how and when to remove these template messages, Learn how and when to remove this template message, "How To Remove Rust From A Gun Without Damaging Bluing? Hardening will cause it to be more brittle, which could cause the hammer to chip and cause injury. The steel is also used for producing great police flashlights with awesome durability. Spray down the whole barreled action with copious amounts of WD-40, inside and out. In the automotive world this is a common practice. My apologies for the background noise in the first half of the video We had compressors running where I Dont mess with hot salts. -An old container filled with your chosen degreaser (unleaded petrol), -Your desired polished metal object/s (very important! Bluing may be applied by immersing steel parts in a solution of potassium nitrate, sodium hydroxide, and water heated to the boiling point, 275310F (135154C) depending on the recipe. Then you have to heat the metal. When the first patch gets really funky, then drop that in your plastic garbage container (remember, these patches have been soaked in acid solutions! Then, use a pair of tongs to carry the steel to a container filled with water or vegetable, and submerge the hot metal in the liquid. That can be a pen torch (pictured), a blow torch, a heat gun, a gas hob (which I am going use) or anything that will provide you with enough heat. Next wash your piece in your chosen degreaser for a minute or so to get rid of all grease/fingerprints that was on the metal. 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 aint the good death.. Keep a fire extinguisher near your workstation in case of a fire. But the article was very informative. If cold bluing is the only practical option, the area should be kept oiled to extend the life of the coating as much as possible. Do NOT wipe/touch your metal with anything after degreasing as the whole purpose of cleaning was then for nothing. To shrink, I assumed you heated the steel plate only, to expand the hole in it. The ideal setup is a pair of long sleeve gloves along with splash goggles and a face mask. } it would appear these sights are drifted into dovetails. Alternitavely you can leave it in the oil bath to stabilize. I use it, oh so cautiously in making my biodiesel. Is the torch used to heat metal ..ONLY.with Cold bluing? Drift the sights back in from the right side of the barrel. Right now I'm working on excavator replacement pins! Then remove it from the degreaser, don't be tempted to wipe it off with anything. Next you hold it in front of your heat source until a blue oxide layer covers the whole blade edge. This method was adopted by larger firearm companies for large scale, more economical bluing. Bluing (steel) - Wikipedia For this Instructable I'm using thread cutting oil. The parts are then boiled in distilled water, blown dry, then carded, as with rust bluing. The cotton gloves insulate your fingers from the heated barrel, and they prevent oils from your skin from getting on the raw steel. The tempering reduces the amount of martensite and thus makes the steel softer. Vegetable oil has a higher boiling point, so the hot steel will take longer to cool and reduce the chance of it cracking. Were committed to providing the world with free how-to resources, and even $1 helps us in our mission. This heating forms the blue on the plate. The usual mistake on buffing wheels is using too coarse a compound, and then the wheel becomes quite aggressive in removing material. The thickness of the oxide is a function of how hot you heat the steel (The color is due to interference of light reflecting from the surface of the oxide coating, and light reflecting from the oxide-steel interface). It's worth noting that there can be some additives in motor oil that release hydrocarbons when burnt which is a known carcinogens to the body (in other words: Bad Stuff!). That surface rust on the barrel could be polished off easily. Gas burners can usually do the job for this. An ideal temperature is 180 degrees Fahrenheit but it also depends on the manual. Next, suspend the components in a cleaning solution tank to get rid of dirt, oil, grease, and crud. *700F is very close to the heat treatment temperature of some steels. Thanks for always being so willing to share, Sir. 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 arms length), you see no dips, waves, ripples, etc. "Rust bluing" and "fume bluing" provide the best rust and corrosion resistance as the process continually converts any metal that is capable of rusting into magnetite (Fe3O4). You risk a big fire that is self sustaining by the reaction itself. Thank you all who had a part in the production of this important information! Fume bluing is another process similar to rust bluing. When everything is set up, put on your protective gear and then get down to business. Remove the bolt & trigger group this might require a pin punch on some guns to pull the trigger group.From what little I can see in the picture here . 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. Keep them in that state while you heat them but be sure to not boil up the tank. I wasnt planning on doing it for a few months. They are still sometimes used by gunsmiths to obtain an authentic finish for a period gun of the time that rust bluing was in vogue, analogous to the use of browning on earlier representative firearm replicas. 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. Just dont do it. Get it Feb 25 - 27. Color case hardening is the predecessor of all metal coloring typically employed in the firearms industry. You can reassemble the gun after. Holy crap, did that reaction hurt like hell. Do all the prep you would for express or rust blueing, especially degreasing. {"smallUrl":"https:\/\/www.wikihow.com\/images\/thumb\/8\/81\/Harden-Steel-Step-1-Version-3.jpg\/v4-460px-Harden-Steel-Step-1-Version-3.jpg","bigUrl":"\/images\/thumb\/8\/81\/Harden-Steel-Step-1-Version-3.jpg\/aid1214287-v4-728px-Harden-Steel-Step-1-Version-3.jpg","smallWidth":460,"smallHeight":345,"bigWidth":728,"bigHeight":546,"licensing":"