Jagermeister, to answer the original question...the top lever on the Ithaca factory NID's was case colored...the trigger guards were blued.
I own several NID's that have been re cased using the bone charcoal method by different gunsmiths, including Turnbull and while none of them have exactly duplicated the original Ithaca
factory case colors...the blues and yellows are not quite as soft...all are quite good. Turnbull's re case colors on NID's tend to be a little darker than other gunsmiths. While never having been a fan of the heat chemical process, the NID pictured in the first thread appears to be pretty close in duplicating the examples that I own. According to Walt, in the 60's when a customer sent an NID back to the factory for restoration, Ithaca would re-do the receiver using a heat chemical process. Probably because the risk of warping the receiver was less than using the bone charcoal method.
