Personally I have no objection to colour case hardening modern guns. We had this before onhere regarding cch of Ruger No1's.The late Mr Gaddy chimed in and mentioned that the colours appeared before the critical temperature. If you did it that way no alteration to the metal structure/strength would/should be achieved.
Proper cch of old mausers is a bit different, or the metal will move and once you put the barrel back on it will go past where it used to be and can slightly screw up headspace to and bolt bearings. Or it comes back without that but is soft and as soon as you fire it bolt will suffer setback with ensuing problems.Usual cch problems they are.
ASlong as the action was without cracks before cch(which you check with a cracktester) then I don't see any "major" safety worries on it, aslong as it's off correct hardness. Just annoyances for the guy putting it back together.
Now if you properly cc hardened a piece of 4140 yeah fair enough to me then the bloke doing it needs a bit more then a clip around the ears .
If you did cyanide hardening at only 20 thou deep that's how it's meant to be done.
There are so many cch mauser actions out there now , that if there was a serious safety problem with them it would be known by now.
The old mausers are meant to be made off low carbon steels like 1035(source kuhnhausen)and with the reworking one does on them you easily remove the existing hardening and have to do it again.
The old hardening wasn't always perfect either, ranging from 0.002" to 0.008" and a hardness off C25 and C26(source kuhnhausen again and more then believable to me).
Yes Kuhnhausen used the C scale instead off the N scale but having a rockwell C scale hardness tester seems to work for me to.
Now if you re cc hardened them you at times can get them harder then that if you're lucky.
Last edited by ArnoldB; 08/26/07 11:01 PM.
