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Joined: May 2007
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cadet Offline OP
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Copied and pasted from where I posted elsewhere and posted all at once, but I thought there'd be some here who'd appreciate this; I'm a bit excited about it!:

I'm a sucker for the old, odd, weird and wonderful. Ideally it has hammers and/or damascus barrels. However some of these pieces come to me looking a little the worse for the century and more of wear. So I have some projects.
I also have a bit of spare time just now, so I thought I'd have a crack at refinishing an old damascus barrel.
Here's some pics:
before

some of the pits dressed down, and polished progressively finer back to 600 grit

dunked in a copper sulphate solution for a while:

Sludge left by the CuSO4 bath:

Sludge wiped off; the pattern is already showing through.

The actual browning solution has now been applied, and I just have to wait for it to rust, rub the rust off, reapply the browning solution etc through a few more cycles.
The other bits:

after first rusting, approx 24 hrs:

After rust rubbed back:

Justhave to keep rusting and rubbing for a while now...
Done:

After half a dozen or more cycles of rust, scrub, degrease, rust etc and the final scrub and degrease, I dunked it in a bath of hot water and bicarb soda to stop the rusting action. Dried it, rubbed a bit of linseed oil to highlight and protect it.

Came up better than I thought it would:

It's possible to see the join just ahead of the forend where a different, thinner riband was joined to the thicker breech end.

[img]http://i606.photobucket.com/albums/tt146/cadet450/IMG_0910_zps17591974.jpg[/img]
Some observations:
I was a bit concerned that the environment I had the barrel sitting in (cool, dark, dry) and this time of year (warm, dry) would not be humid enough to promote the rust I needed for browning. That proved not such an issue.
The value of thorough attention to detail, in the filing and polishing of the surface is important (but I suspect I didn't need to go as fine as I did); a few pits I could have taken deeper, some blemishing around the breech end I could have hit harder, as they've left some unsightly darker blemishing.
I had thought I wasn't going to get much pattern/contrast/colour, even after the final scrub (and it's not the most exciting pattern either), but I stopped as the barrel appeared not to be changing much after about 6-8 cycles. It turned out better than I'd thought after rubbing with linseed oil, though not as brown as I'd hoped.
Not sure whether it's "greys" in the metal, or whether I should have scrubbed harder after the copper bath, but in bright sun there's golden flecks in the metal ahead of the join near the forend; that they don't appear at the breech end makes me believe it's in the way the metal took the finish, rather than my attention to detail in re-finishing.

Last edited by cadet; 01/02/13 07:16 PM.
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Nice!

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I'm impressed. Very nice work. Wait till Drew sees it!
Jim


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Great photos and description of your process. Thanks for sharing it.


When an old man dies a library burns to the ground. (Old African proverb)
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Wow!
Nice Job!!!


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Well done and thank you.
Here's another tube segment joint (also Laminated Steel). The patterns join in a straight line weld suggesting that one tube was flared, the other coned, and then butt welded together.


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Nice job, but from my experience the Copper sulfate solution is a waste of time. If you have to use it try about a 5% solution for 10-15 minutes. I do not believe it gives and edge on etching as some of the instructions would leave you to believe.
Nice Browns are really hard to get without a high humidity atmosphereI have found.

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Angier did not speak well at all of the use of Coper Sulfate in bluing. One of its problems is it will "Flash Plate" steel but not with a very adherent plate. Before the development of efficient & inexpensive layout inks many machine shops used to keep a vat of Copper Sulfate solution to dip parts to be layed out in. The layout lines could then be made in the copper & after machining it was easily removed.


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Because Laminated Steel has a higher ratio of steel to iron, mixed together, and ‘puddled’ before being formed into rods it is harder to get a distinct contrast; esp 'browning' vs 'black & white'. Try a crolle damascus barrel next smile

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Great work! Thanks for sharing.

Franchi

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