About Me: A certified yet non-professional gunsmith learning the trade through trail and inspiration

Monday, November 13, 2017

Project War Horse part 2

This is the 2nd and final post regarding this build.....see part One here.
When I reblued the parts, something contaminated the bath and the slide turned out terrible, it was blotchy and had spots where the bluing didn't take
 The other parts turned out great (they went in first)
Because winter had set in, bluing outside was going to have to wait, so I decided to try rust bluing again.

Again I used the Mark Lee Express Blue.

After stripping the slide back down I polished it back to a high shine


The 1st round of rust
 The steel got progressively darker


Once completed, I assembled the gun to see what it looked like

You can see that the color does not match, the frame and parts are darker.

The owner was not pleased with the color of the rust blued slide, so I offered to reblue the slide one more time using the hot salts method.

I had a couple of other guns that needed to go into the tank, so I stripped the slide back down to bare metal using naval jelly



and I polished it back to a 2000 grit finish



and reblued it, this time we got the colors to match





I left the top of the slide in a matte finish




Before and after shots: