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.
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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.