doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Any one have experience with hot blued barrels?

I found a scarce setup Parker that was hot blued, barrels and receiver. Steel barrel. Ribs seem tight and the barrels ring. Does any one here have personal experience with how hot blued barrels held up on a Parker or other double gun you owned? Did the ribs come loose after shooting for a while? Looking for personal experience, please no theory or opinions.

I have repaired a lot of them, they always pop free given enough time. Figure the cost of re-laying the ribs into the price you offer on the gun.

I have a Fox Sterlingworth that had the barrels hot blued about 2 years ago.It has had a fair amount of use since then.That is not to say I they won't have problems later down the line.The guy who blued them said he has never had any problems with hot blueing doubles, something about removing them from the hot bath and not leaving them in to long I don't know all I know is they turned out great with no problems yet.

Since Parkers and other high end guns were silver soldered, they usually hold up through the hot bluing process. Usually the bigger issue is the solution that gets between the tubes. It can continue to rust the metal from the inside out and cause problems down the road.

Parkers and most high end guns are soft soldered(lead/tin) not silver soldered. The tin is compromised by the blueing salts. Slow rust blue is the correct finish fo5r a Parker, nothing else.

I don't know of any American doubles that had silver soldered barrels. Parkers, LC Smiths, Fox, and Ithaca, were definitely tin/lead soldered.

The only guns I've, personally, run across that were "silver soldered" were less expensive Spanish guns. I had a set of a Spanish gun's barrels, that were silver brazed, hot blued.

I note that Brownell's always advertized their Force 44 lead free soft solder (primarily tin) as being safe in a hot blue tank. having used force 44 solder & also having done hot bluong in the past I found this to be true.

I was always of the opinion the alkaline componenet (LYE) of the hot blues attacked the lead component of ordinary soft solders. Lead is Acid resistant, but apparently not Alkaline resistant.

If anyone cares to experiment on this simply "Very Carefully" mix up a solution of water & Merry War Lye & drop in a chunk of lead & one of tin & observe the results.

PS; Even back in muzzle-loader days most Belgian double shotguns were brazed including the ribs. Many English ML'rs were totally soft soldered including the breech jointing.

Some hang together longer than others, but they all seem to separate sooner or later. Not in a manner usually thought of in that the rib(s) fall free from the tubes but they do develope loose/gaps along the seams and eventually there's more loose area than soldered area.

Another problem is that the hot blueing salts gets inbetween the ribs just like the hot water does in rust blueing.
Hot water is easy to steam/evaporate out but the salt soln. is difficult to rinse out through a tiny weep hole.
The salts can corrode in there and grow a white 'bloom' as they absorb H2O from the air.
Oil won't kill their activity.

IIRC one of the last batches of Ithaca NID BBls were hot blued by the factory and found to be unsuitable. The bbls were scrapped leaving a number of finished small bore NID stocked actions w/ forends around for many years.

One 'trick' used by some gunsmiths was to use a small amt. of potassium cyanide in the hot salt blueing tank while doing soft soldered bbl sets. Supposedly it protected the soft solder/lead component from the attack of the blueing salt compound during the process. Wether it worked or just delayed it, I don't know.

I just view hot salt blued bbl sets (soft soldered) as haveing to be redone at some point.

I've seen Spanish and Belgian guns with silver soldered tubes. There are undoubtedly others, but never a Parker, Fox, LCS, Ithaca, etc with anything other than soft soldered ribs.

did american companies use tin /lead or just tin? i had thought English guns used tin. was lead added because it is cheep.the expansion and contraction of tin is similar mild steel.hot blued sxs will come apart at the ribs.i think someone at Trinidad did a force 44 test and it didn't hold up. mc

Mark,
The LCs and Parker barrels I had apart were lead/tin. I don't believe the purpose of adding lead was for economy, but rather for its eutectic result. The alloy of lead/tin at 38/62% respectively, is a lower melting temp than either metal separately.