Wednesday, June 20, 2007

Second try at bluing

Decided to try it on another couple of pieces the other day. Pretty simple, put the salts & solution in the pot, water in the rinse pot and start them heating while cleaning/degreasing the pieces. At proper temp hang the pieces in and boil for 25 minutes, maybe a couple more(lost exact track). This time everything had a bit of the red 'smut' on them when they came out, but brushing in the hot water cleaned it right off. Oil and let it sit overnight. Overnight's probably not necessary, but actually managed to leave it this time.

I'd heard that bluing salts 'creep', and they do. I'd stored the stuff in a plastic tub with a snap-on lid. When I poured the liquid into the pot I found the salts very thin in the center, very thick in the corner and they'd crept halfway up the sides. Soft, and easy to scrape out into the pot.

One of the pieces I did was another knife blade, I'll post pictures later on(busy evening, bad night, I'll get to it). So far this stuff works really well.

By the way, to the holders of the Human-Caused Global Warmering, 30% my ass. 30% was the chance of some scattered thunderstorms in this area last night. Which means it stormed and rained from about midnight to almost ten this morning. God knows how much rain, my gauge was on the ground so no measure; if I'm decipering the NWS listing they officially show about 1.75". I repeat, they can't predict this crap but they claim they can tell what the weather will be in 50-100 years?

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