This one was brought to me a while back by a member of our local forum and he did most of the work for me. Leaving me to perform the final polish and bluing.
Here is what the parts look like before bluing
Some additional polishing
I then degreased the parts and prepped them for bluing
I also polished and nitre blued the screws
While I was at it I used the nitre salts to give the mag latch and safety lever a straw color, as close as I could get to the color case hardening that the factory did
I got all the parts blued, here is what they look like now
A finishing touch before sending the parts home, I paint the safety and ready to fire indicators with red Testors enamel paint
After finishing the stock and assembling the gun, he posted some pictures and the history of the rifle:
A Remington 511 that I inherited from my dad. He bought it with when he was in high school in the late 50s to hunt squirrels on the farm in Minnesota. I got it from him in about 1998ish for camping trips. It had been in storage since about 1965 when my dad was drafted and was in rough but not bad shape considering how it was stored for most of its life. It had some surface rust with some light pitting but nothing real deep and the stock showed wear and tear in the finish but no dents or penetrating scratches. I told him I'd clean up the rust and reblue it. So I got it all cleaned up and got the cold bluing kit and redid it. Well as a lot of you know cold bluing an entire gun usually has less than desirable results. I decided that it functioned well enough so I just left it as is and shot it as is.
Fast forward till about 4/5 years ago I was going over it after a range session and was a bit disgusted with how it was looking. Minus the rust it looked worse than when I got it. So I pulled it apart and started sanding and polishing out the metalwork and then it ended up getting shoved aside while I worked on other projects. About 3/4 months ago I came across it while doing work on my other guns and decided that it has to get done ASAP. So I finished polishing up the metal parts and dropped them off with TCB for bluing. While the parts were off being blued I turned my attention to the stock. I'm not a wood worker so I hit up my brother in law for advise on refinishing the stock. With the information from him and other sources I stripped it down and refinished it. All the parts came back together this past Thursday and I got to work reassembling it all.
Everything is original to the rifle with the exception of the scope and rings. The scope my dad had on it is a 3/4" J.C. Higgens 4x which I find a bit difficult to use with as in has a very narrow eye relief. I topped it with a Leupold VX-1 2x7 28 scope in Burris steel rings.
I only wish he was still around to see how it turned out but we did get to go shooting once about a year before he passed.
