Belgian Gun Blue ---

Carding means use of a "card", a term for a short stiff wire brush, originally used to "card" or comb wool to get out the weeds, seeds, and burrs and straighten the wool strands. The term is also used for cleaning metal residue out of the teeth of a file, and the short wire brush used for that is called a "file card."

Now if you want some fun, go into a hardware store and ask the teen-age clerk for a "file card".

Jim
 
Jim, He/she would probably send me to Office Depot. :)

I am 68 and do not recall hearing the expression thus my question. I assume 0000 steel wool after being soaked in denatured alcohol will accomplish the mission. Maybe, I am wrong.
 
Metal Alloys ---

I blued a Remington 7400 bbl. and a cylinder from an older Ruger
3 screw .41 Magnum over the last few months and they turned out
beautiful with a nice gloss after working them with # 600 & # 800
high quality sand paper.
Now I have trigger guards from a Win. 75 & a Rem. 722 that will not
take the solution after numerous applications.
The 75 stays a darker grey & the 722 has a spotted light & dark
dull like finish. I have some Laurel Mountain solution that I'm going
to try and boil for about 15 minutes. All with Distilled water.

Thanks
 
Thanks to the OP and others. I just finished the right plate on a S&W 5 screw .38 M&P Model 1905 4th Change. There was a significant ding that needed to be buffed out and blued. It turned out great and is a good match for the rest of the revolver which is in decent condition. It was shipped from S&W in Nov. 1929.

It provided me with the confidence to reblue an entire Norinco Model 213 which was sound mechanically but showed significant loss of bluing on the entire exterior. It now has a very reasonable appearance.

All was done with the Belgian Gun Blue. I used acetone and denatured alcohol to remove all oil/grease. Distilled water was used in the boiling process. I did find a small dremel size brush worked great for the carding process along with 0000 steel wool cleaned with denatured alcohol. The carding tool is more like a bristle vs. wire wheel.

All of the above took about two gallons of distilled water and approximately thee ounces of the sixteen ounce bottle of bluing chemical.
 
Rust bluing

WAY back when in school (CST), Herters Belgian Blue was the primary stuff we used. A few tried some other blends, but always came back to Herters. We used plain tap water in the tanks and I can't recall the degreaserthat was used, other than it was the same as the stuff used for hot bluing as well. Just degreased the 0000 steel wool in the degreaser tank. Blue was heated in a Pyrex mixing cup hung over the tank side into the water tank. Carding was the term that was used to describe removing the rust between coats of blue. That was all done by hand. Pretty time consuming compared to hot bluing, but I think it actually gave a tougher finish. I wonder just who made the blue for Herters?
 
Kapusta, I think it's an old formula that they obtained, and started to make. Since Herter's was a sporting goods chain, I'd say they first relabeled something, and had been given a formula from a manufacturer, and later, mass produced it.

I have an old, and pretty hard to get, book, on all the old bluing 'recipes', and there were many. Some are too poisonous or dangerous to handle, to be honest. Of course, back in the 1800's and early 1900's, one could experiment, without worrying about the EPA or OSHA breathing down their necks.
 
you guys are correct to say that most bottled water comes from a city tap.......but, it is then reverse osmosis filtered before bottled.i know off topic, but I don't people to think your getting nothing for your money, you are getting most chemicals and impurities removed by the "Factory" treated waters. 45% of bottled water actually come from springs, and then also reverse osmosis treated.
 
That may be right. I first started to use rust bluing in the late 80's, with the Pilkington solution sold by Brownells. I quickly discovered the rust would not convert when boiled in my water. The town we lived in had its wells in limestone, an that water had a whopping 35 grains per gallon dissolved solids. We used to joke about the water being so hard you could be knocked unconscious taking a shower. It certainly ruined iron pipes by building a deposit until a section of pipe first looked like the ceiling of a cave, except all the stalactites were pointing radially inward, and then finally became choked off completely. Maybe that tendency to create a deposit is why it didn't convert rust, depositing protection of the red rust instead. Or maybe it was just the high pH. It flat would not convert rust, not to mention all the white water spot scale it left on everything.

So, I drove to the next town where Culligan had a facility. The guys there took pity on me and let me show up with a couple of 5 gallon plastic carboys and made high meg DI water for me. The way this worked is the commercial water softening tanks they changed by subscription (as opposed to an installed water softener) had to meet hotel and restaurant sodium content requirements, so they were back flushed to clear salt much more thoroughly than a home unit will do it. They hooked up some of these low sodium deionizing tanks in series (I'm remember 5 of 6), until what came out of the last one read very high on their megohmmeter (don't recall the number), meaning very few ions remained. That water worked great for rust bluing. Conversion was great and not a hint of a water spot anywhere.

I'm pretty sure a home reverse osmosis machine would give you the same result. No reason to think otherwise. Feed it water that's soft in the first place, and its membrane should last well.

BTW, the earliest rust bluing didn't use solutions. It used a steam cabinet. You suspended the plugged bore or other parts in the steam box, put a watchglass with a few drops of nitric acid in it to emit fumes, then closed the box and had sort of kettle with a feed tube that you boiled water in to force steam into the box. The humidity and nitric acid vapor did the trick.
 
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I hadn't heard of that last version.
I have seen several renditions of slow rust bluing with the parts painted with rusting agent and hung in a damp cabinet. Care is taken to avoid actual steam that might condense on the steel and spot the finish.

Most of the stuff you see now is fast rust bluing with very corrosive rusting agents. Be careful, Harry Pope damaged an eye with it.
 
I've tried to recall where I saw the English shotgun makers were doing that in the 19th century, but I don't. I know I have an illustrated description of the steam box, and thought it was in Howe, but I don't see it there in Vol. II under bluing, so I am remembering incorrectly. I'll have to keep looking.

Regarding the condensation, it may be the steam was run to get the box warm for a time and the work kept in a low oven, just above the boiling point before it is put into the cabinet, but I don't recall.
 
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