Hot water bluing?

B

bswiv

New member
A number of you were kind enough to answer my question about hot bluing a O/U shotgun. I asked the smith about how he was going to blue it and it would seem that all I heard originally was the HOT part and assumed ( We all know where assuming will get us! ) that he meant hot salt.

Turns out what he is proposing is to HOT SALT BLUE the standing breach and then he will HOT WATER BLUE the barrels. He's using a Brownells product and says that he's had good luck with it.

Anything a ignorant person like me should know here?

I do appreciate the input of the more knowledgable out there.
 
Sounds like he is proposing to use Dicropan. That is the right product to do what you are trying to do. It is not caustic, so it will not affect the solder between the barrels. I reblued a Superposed with Dicropan and it looked absolutely brand new when I was done. It's not a simple product to use, though. The degreasing has to be done properly or the finish can look splotchy, and it takes several applications to get a good blue. Make sure he knows how to use it or the bores on your gun can get rusted with all the cycles in and out of hot water it takes.
 
Thank you............

Makes me more comfortable with the issue.

He said that it had to be VERY clean, boiled in some sort of cleaner and then very throughly rinsed, before he did the bluing. And he did say that it would take a number of trips through the solution to get the blue right.
 
I wondered the same thing about the other parts of the action but then I always had the same question about every other blued gun.

How do they keep the blue off the parts they don't want blued?
 
By "hot water" bluing, I expect he may mean rust bluing, a very fine way to finish a high quality shotgun.

As for protecting the bore, the normal way (with hot tank or any other process involving submerging the gun) of protecting the barrel is to drive oversize wood dowels into both ends. This not only protects the bore, but gives perfect "handles" to pick up the gun/barrel without touching the metal.

Actually some gunsmiths, and some factories, using hot tank bluing just go ahead and blue the bore and chamber. It doesn't make any difference unless the customer looks into the bore and screams bloody murder at the "black" bore.

Jim
 
You dont have to worry about it. If you want, say, the sides of the hammer in the white, you polish the bluing off after the fact.

Keep in mind a double barreled shotgun has tons of voids inside the ribs, etc that you have to get the water out of. We used a hot-water-soluable-oil bath after the fact to try to get either salts or water out.

There are those who plug bores, etc, but I found it to be a lot of work, and questionable benefit. Remember, bluing isnt like a paint; its converting the surface steel of the gun into an iron oxide; it's a controlled rusting process.
 
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