Nitre bluing

[jamesharrison]

Anybody do any nitre bluing of screws, pins, &c.? How did it work out?

Where did you get your salts?

Did you use a Lee or other lead melter?

Thanks,

Jim

 

[bushwhacker]

Don't mean to derail your thread, but for small parts, you can do a really nice heat blue job with a torch and oil quenching. Best part is if at first you don't succeed, you can polish it up and try again.

 

[ronnie01]

Yup ^^^ works well.

R

 

[SkytopBrewster]

I made a run to the border a while back for salts and also got a bucket of Brownells nitre salts, works well in a lee lead melter, did the torch thing too but it's a little trickier to get consistant color, with the salts you can just set the temp to whatever color you want. It melts at around 600f, been a while

 

[plmnkoqaz]

I've been trying it out on small bits for a norc 1911 I'm refinishing. I used a mix of 60% potassium nitrate, 39% sodium nitrate and 1% manganese dioxide. I've been able to get a beautiful peacock blue. Burned my hand something fierce with a drip, but it's been pretty cool to fool around with. I'm just using the small Lee lead pot set to #4.

 

[A&Shuntr]

Don't mean to derail your thread, but for small parts, you can do a really nice heat blue job with a torch and oil quenching. Best part is if at first you don't succeed, you can polish it up and try again.

Not a big fan of altering the tensile strength of fasteners.

 

[plmnkoqaz]

Not a big fan of altering the tensile strength of fasteners.

If you keep the temperature below 700 degrees F it shouldn't change the heat treatment.

And with firearms fasteners are typically not used in high stress situations. Annealing even an action screw is not going to reduce the shear strength enough to cause problems.