Anvil 013: Rust Bluing on the Cheap

hey guys we're back again we get asked the question should i refinish my mill syrup hmm we're going to answer that question today 1916 spanish mouser that needs a little bit of armory refreshing here so i brought my friend bob from rustblue.com down to show you how to basically turn a cinderblock black this guy knows how to do it so we're on the on the money there so say hi bob hi bob outstanding all right mark what we've got here is a a spanish uh model 1916 uh carbine it's chambered in 757 mauser okay this particular firearm was imported by samco where's that import stamp i never even saw the import stamp import stamp on this particular model is stamped right underneath the barrel in between the the front sight band and the upper band that was awful nice of them to not fart it up by right on the side of the receiver wasn't it not the usual dot matrix you see how handy that is yes okay it uh it's actually in pretty good condition i'm impressed with it it's it's it's sporting its original finish uh you can tell by looking inside the action it's unblued in the raceways which means this this gun is still wearing its original rust blue that it carried from the factory um it uh it's got a little bit of surface rust but we're going to be cleaning some of that up today so basically we're going to do an ordinance level repair on this we are that we're going to uh we're not in the business of or i'm not in the business either of trying to to make a new gun out of an old gun uh my objective in these is is a functional restoration i call it that is we want to do what the armory would have done had this this weapon been sent into a depot for refurbishment we want to try to do exactly what they would have done and we want to replicate the finishes that they used on the metal and also on on the wood outstanding so we'll get it back out in the field so that others can enjoy it that's right okay another 120 years i've seen a couple of things on it while i was looking at it you had pointed out earlier we've got a crack running right down what appears to be a replacement for in so that'll have to be repaired a crack right here through the through the stock from the stock bolt back the beauty of this is no one's tried to repair this so we can do it the right way um so when people ask you know what should i redo my my mill syrup yes absolutely all day because what we're not going to do is cut this thing off at the muzzle and sporterize it we're just going to do 80 years of deferred maintenance and what makes this gun so worth it is when you look down and barreled up boron this thing is cherry so this gun should be very accurate when we get done with it we'll get it cleaned up and let's give her a spin huh we'll get a take apart here let's get some tools on hey bob all right let's do it so now we're back here we went ahead and broke out some tools and we're going to watch bob disassemble this guy in here and he's just going to kind of show you the uh show you sort of the procedure for taking one of these things apart let it rip brother okay mark thanks um well like all good gunsmiths we should always check first see our weapons not loaded and not being loaded we're going to proceed to remove the bolt from the gun rule number one by the way is get to get the gun out of the hands of the customer rule number two keep your yeah rule number two is keep your finger off the trigger and rule number three is don't point it at something you don't want to kill yeah all right this is a a mauser pattern rifle and uh on all all mausers the there's a a center takedown position on the bolt so you want to turn that safety up to the 12 o'clock position then you can proceed to remove the bolt with draw it backwards uh take your thumb and push out on the uh bolt stop hey in a minute let that go for a moment mom yeah okay so here's the bolt stop back over here the mystery hand go ahead and open that up now so they can see through your thumb outstanding thank you very good no that's something i had to learn i hate that you can't see through your hands we're going to open the bolt stock and then we're going to withdraw the bolt ooh cosmoline dirt grease nastiness yeah as you can see this still wears most of its uh original arsenal uh lubricant equivalent of our cosmoline but uh this is a little simpler than the model 98 bolt on this is a model 93 pattern gun although it is a a 1916 refurb to the 1916 pattern uh it's very simple and once you've got it 12 o'clock you can unscrew the fire the fire control and now you're separated into your fire control unit and your in your boat bolt body with the attached uh extractor these can then be set aside and then cleaned later i want to make a point about that bolt when we clean it later about why we're not going to take the extractor off there's an unobtainium part on the bolt body that i want to tell you about later proceeds are very good all right now uh where you proceed from here on this particular rifle the first thing you need to remove is this part right here oops let's slide back a little bit right there there's the front sight guard and this has a pin and usually these pins uh drive in one direction and this particular one i think drives out from left to right okay so i've given bob something here this is just a little plate of steel we have hidden underneath this you all have seen my concrete my um my my big heavy block but this will give him something to buck into because this when you hit this towel it's kind of soft have that all right thanks mark all right so we're going to take an appropriate size pin punch place it on the head of the pen and give it one good wrap to get it started here it goes hole is here now while i whack it all right and there's your pin right there and then this particular sight can then be tapped off to the front i'm just going to use i'm reaching under right now a wooden wooden screwdriver or a hammer here there she goes pop right off and there's your front sight protector which is bent or is it the front sight that's bent the frame these happen but these can be straightened out easily it's pretty soft steel so that's something we're going to tweak the bluing on right so we'll set that in a separate pile we'll set that off here to the right here okay all right now the next thing is we're going to remove these two bands these bands uh hold the fore end of the stock onto the barrel and with that you're going to need a screwdriver for this upper band let me turn this where you can see a little bit better we're going to insert the blade of the screwdriver just behind the band and push in on the leaf spring that's holding this band on and we're going to do that and a little bit of a wiggle and you should be able to pop it right out pop that right off there it goes there it goes all right guys wow we did that without boogering up the wood or the metal amazing oh that's even a better tool [Music] it's almost like i anticipated your needs now see now you can get that off because this was here you couldn't get that band off so we'll set that aside and that's good too because it captures all those metal parts if you disassemble this weapon in the field you don't have all these little parts that you like need to operate the gun lane all over in the mod exactly because it will get lost well uh the middle band the middle band is is fortunately on this particular rifle it's got a protrusion here that you can get your thumb on and it will allow you to get that that particular band off okay and on this model is a cavalry model so it's got a slide a side sling mount okay that's that little swivel gizmo right there right it comes off on the side and there's a corresponding bar in the back in the stock uh that attaches to okay now now we want to get the handguard off the rifle so we lift the front side up to 12 o'clock we start wiggling and jiggling be careful not this particular one's already cracked but this this is part of our our repair process you turn it 90 degrees and lift it off the gun now let me show something here whoa we're going to have to do something about that so that's going to go down the other end of the bench now it's like a job for acker glass yes that's an acro glass job okay all right now we're going to turn our attention to this area right here this this is the bottom metal this contains the floor plate and the uh the trigger guard we need to get that removed and to do that you're going to have to break these two screws and unfortunately they're loose they've been jiggled loose nice amount of hmong there so we are going to go ahead and blew the head of that you think so that has to go in the bluing pile then that'll go in the blue pile internal parts don't go in the blue part external parts do so we'll probably even do the we'll take the barrel bands out and there's a stock crack we got to fix so this is a multi-level repair this isn't just a single-ended no most of these old reef mill syrups you're you're gonna find it it's kind of like buying an old house once you start trying to clean the place up you're gonna find a million things that are wrong right and and these guns are no different there's all kinds of little problems that you're gonna run into and not the least of which is that it's kind of glued together it's kind of glued together with uh dried finish and cosmo and everything else this hmong mung yeah you need a smaller pin i need a smaller pen that should drive right out and there we go blue pile okay all right now we know now that we've got we've got the barreled action free of the wood and what i like to do is take it off the bench and hold it up put your hand around the the stock and the barrel and take the heel of your palm and just give the barrel a little pop like that and that'll loose loosen the action right it just popped right out look at that sweet now let's inspect what we've got and i'm i'm beginning to get a little happy here because we've got a really fine conditioned gun to be as old as it is a lot of these old south american guns and and spanish guns you'll find a tremendous amount of rust under the wood line there's a little bit right here but that's going to clean up fine i don't know we took a long leah part that was a disaster in here it had great big shankers on it and oh yeah this is this is sweet here yeah this is awesome and she's still as i can i can see she's still wearing most of her original blue and but we're gonna we're gonna address that situation in a little bit we're gonna get this this little girl cleaned up and uh as opposed to doing a total strip down to bare metal blue we're going to do what i call just a reefer blue one of the nice things about rust blue and mark is that you can you can go back over areas you can touch up areas so if you've got shiny areas right you don't need to re-blew the entire firearm right you can just use your rust blue solutions and you can re-blue some of these areas that have turned bright and it's the difference between a bluing that's in the steel versus a bluing that's on the steel modern blues are on the top but the old timey blues are down inside and you can damn near not take it off with a wire brush well as you know when you're in in the process of applying these rust blues you have to card the steel that is you have to brush it or scrub it right with steel wool or wire wheel and that's part of the application process and that's stuff's a wire wheel or an uh wire wheel or steel wool is not going to take this off this unlike you know some folks are used to some of the cold blues that you buy in the bottle and just swab on and wipe off those aren't really blues at all those what they do they plate the steel with copper and then there's a chemical in there turns the copper black and that's essentially what the bluing does the bluing process for those and those are very thin and they don't wear well plus they stink we kind of fast forwarded through the disassembly uh but needless to say as you can look on the on the bench here we've got all little pieces parts of this gun laid out and what i'm preparing to do now is to condition the metal prior to the bluing we're going to introduce the the the corroded uh areas of the steel to a steam environment and we're going to we're going to steam it for about 10 or 15 minutes and this will help convert some of the existing rust that's on the good on the gun to a black oxide that'll blend will blend better with the gun what i've got here in preparation you're gonna you'll see the rig in just a minute this is just a regular coat hanger that's been straightened out and it's been inserted through the muzzle and exits the breech here and just put a little l in it through the rear uh tang screw hole and that holds it and this what this will do is this will hold this will hold the barrel to action in the steam pipe it'll let you hang it the conversion if you guys want to go look it up is we're going to convert ferric oxide to ferroferric oxide and also bruno sitting over here steaming at me because i'm the one that screwed up and moved the camera so let me lock that back where it was all right bob let it rip okay and i'm just going to do a little little little pre-steam clean up here we're going to get off the some of the big pieces of the rust here that and this is a usual spot here on these these particular rifles this this little front sight guard it becomes an entrapment area for moisture and then of course notice when he's using his a steel brush we're we're rubbing we're not abrading it's a completely different process if you get in here with sandpaper or you really really grind on it with a wire wheel really hard you start to abrade and that starts removing metal that's bad sorry bob just one of those thank you i appreciate that mark yeah yeah some of these areas are a little stubborn and you just have to just have to persevere here but what we're trying to do is just get down is to the thinnest coating of rust that we can have uh thick rust won't convert very well but if you can get down to that little layer of rust that's just on the surface of the metal you can you can uh you can cause that to turn dark i said i'm getting there now what you guys are going to see is is that the converted rust the top layer of it's almost flaky and it's very easy to remove um so then we're working with a very soft top layer that's easy to remove instead of really hard really stubborn like trying to grind down through the rust you got to remove the metal to get down to the bottom of it yeah i'm progressing down the barrel now i'm on the rear sight now this particular gun uh this was uh this particular site right here was the the very first mauser patent for a tangent rear sight uh this is the this is the very first model and it was introduced on this rifle if you really want to get into the nitty-gritties in 93 pattern mausers go back and look at the primer on it yeah very good we know just enough about these things to stay out of our own way but they they when these guns were made they intentionally left this metal here with the graduations in meters in the white the rest of the site was blued but this part was left in the white to make it more easily visible because if it were blue you'd have a really hard time seeing the numbers especially in low light yeah i mean you're out there and uh you're out there in the spanish desert fighting some kind of conflagration and you look at him you look you look at the ranger gun you can't find your sight markings so they put them in the white so you can see them sites we don't need those thinking sites no seismom shooting by braille so we're just about there now walking down that rear bridge you're gonna hear the odd bang because while bob's doing that i'm attempting to dynamite the butt plate screws out of the ass end of this thing [Laughter] success i am the carbon based light form so once we get this done we're going to steam it and convert as much as we can of this stuff and then we're going to coat the whole gun in a rust bluing solution now you say what well remember we're not coating we're not applying this stuff like paint we're laying a chemical on the top and it will react with the metal that's bare and not react with the metal that's already been passivated so what will happen is is the bare spots will eventually catch up to the rest of the gun and the whole thing will look the same and it'll look correct and uniform exactly and we're still preserving the original finish that was on the gun so this is one way of doing this now if this thing was all the way gone and rusted and pitted out we'd have to go down a bare metal but guys we're doing what the armorers would do they come in and scrub this thing steam the crap out of it and throw it back out in the field so here we said exactly now i've gotten just about all of it off that i can get off victory all right but play nice i love it when that happens yeah all right all right this uh this particular rifle was purchased by one of the students that i taught when i taught high school so um he gets the little he gets the shout out i'm not going to use his name because i'm not that stupid on the internet somebody will dox him but we're uh we're redoing um i like this when people bring me stuff especially when i've known them and taught them and you know what everybody turns out okay eventually so just knocking you here is me just knocking the knocking the gun apart so bob and i are working and because we're working in parallel we might actually get this thing done in one sitting nice and i just found the first pitting that i have found on this rifle it's a tiny spot here yeah nothing that's even gonna come close that gun that gun is built like a brick shit house you're not gonna dq that for a pit unless it goes halfway through the bore yeah i'm totally completely unconcerned yeah right there yeah i'm totally completely that's nothing yeah and that's that's going to be under the hand guard but the most important part about this is we stopped it exactly we stopped it from going any further it's called maintenance guys look it up nice all right well let's move over to the uh the steaming apparatus and i'll give you a brief uh run over okay now we've moved over to a different part of the shop and i'm gonna uh describe to you the little contraption i've got put together to to uh to rust blue guns at home without expenditure of a lot of money one of one of the things that frustrates uh amateur gunsmiths and folks trying to do restorations on a lot of these old guns that if you want to do a proper rust blue they think that you got to go buy you know 150 tank and a 250 gas burner and before you know it you got 500 invested in a system then you got to use distilled water gallons and gallons and gallons of distilled water to boil stuff in well that's not what industry did back in the day beginning in about the 1850s and on through world war one most military farms and commercial farms at the time were rust blue it started out as is slow cold rust blueing and you probably read about this where it took days and weeks to rust blew a gun well that's not good enough for industry industry had to have a way that when there's a war coming and i got to produce a thousand rifles a day i got to have some way to do it and that's what came came to be known as accelerated rust blowing and not only that that's a very consistent process but where accelerated rustling is consistent unaccelerated natural aid it depends upon the natural humidity in the air depends upon a lot of stuff that you can't accurately repeat and when you're in business that just don't fly so so industry with access to steam and the plants use steam to convert the oc the oxide on the metal instead of boiling it in tanks so what i've done here is put together a very inexpensive outfit i got a little turkey fryer gas burner a ten dollar stainless steel pot from the dollar store uh about ten dollars worth of cellular core pvc pipe and make sure you get cellular core because the regular pvc is too thin you got to get the thicker one then i just used a a notch the top of the pipe and then i took a three inch pipe cap and then this is the end off a broken rake is my crossbar you put a quart of tap water in the pot bring it to a boil and when the pipe gets good and hot like it is now you introduce your metal it to be steam so what we're going to do is first of all before we start actually blueing we're going to we're going to convert as much of the rust that's on the gun to black oxide so here's our here's our 1916 spanish i put the uh the coat hanger through the barrel and i fixed it through the guard screw hole and we're going to put it on our put it on our crossbar our professional crossbar hang it try to get it kind of centered in the pipe there's two reasons for gloves guys one is you don't want to get oil on this action now we've pretty much scrubbed it down and when we get it hot this time the oil come off and two there's a lot of latent heat of vaporization in that steam and you better respect the fact that the steam burn is nasty because when it gets on you it just keeps on gloves are must leather gloves are a must all right we're going to uh let that cook for about ten minutes and come back to you all right fast forward ten minutes uh we've had our we've had our steel soaking now and in live steam for for 10 minutes we're going to cut our we're going to cut our gas off and we're going to remove our steam pipe from the toilet flange on top and take our cap off and pull out our barreled action well done we don't have to tell you folks that this pig's hot right it's smoking hot you better have gloves it's already starting to burn me through leather gloves all right over to the bench so we're now we're going to take her to the bench and we're going to do what's called the old days they called it scratching but nowadays we call it carting in other words we're going to we're going to scrape off the loose rust with a wire brush our steel has cooled off to room temperature now we can handle it and we proceeded to uh uh the bench vise here where we've got just got a drill motor attached with a with a uh a fine carting wheel this is used to to card uh uh rust blue guns and one important factor with this you don't need to use this wheel on anything else you you need to get a wheel like this or you can use steel wool if you don't want to buy a wheel you can use steel wool but when we shop and we've got access to the wheel you do not want to contaminate this wheel with grease or other metals you want it only to be used to to rub rust off of gun and bob it's important to note that one of the places where all that contaminant comes from is oil is placed on steel wool when it's inside its package so if you use steel wool and by all means use it i would say like a four odd or maybe a three ott put it in a small container pour some acetone in it and get all the oil off the wall first and then that way you don't contaminate it with the very thing you're using the current that's an excellent point all right let's get this drill motor running what you want to do is just you don't want to sit in one place too long you just want to move it back and forth until you can see the the the blue metal revealed underneath it and look at the camera can pick this up right you can i think the camera can pick up the rust film that's on the surface of the metal this is what happened when we steamed it in the steam pipe we converted that rust layer to uh to magnetite and now we're going to carve off this the the oxide that's loose on the surface so so so so so so okay i hope this comes through well in the video but as you can see all that rust was converted on this barrel it was loosened and then it was able to be wheeled away there are some spots that where the bluing was removed up around the band up here here on the barrel where the other band was but what we're going to do now is is now this is cleaned up we're going to degrease it and then from now on you should only handle your gunmetal with with i have nitrile gloves on but latex works well vinyl gloves work but you don't want human hands to touch the metal after this so in essence bob what we're doing here is we're picking up right where the ordinance uh guys left off we've converted a layer and now we're going to add chemicals and just pick up where they left off and then everything will catch up outstanding that's right so don't worry you guys that are doing this uh uh don't worry about these little bright spots because because all this will blend together once we get into the rust blueing process the rust bluing chemicals by their nature will help blend and merge this all together then we can use the wire wheel then to groom that finish into a very uniform and a finish that would that will be identical to what was on this gun when it left the factory okay now we're ready to uh we've got this barrel carded uh uh off camera i degreased it with acetone three washes uh now what we're going to do is put our first coat of rust bluing solution on here now this this is a product i make uh it's a it's it's a combination of inorganic acids metallic salts surfactants and other agents but it it closely approximates what uh an armory would have used in the late 1800s early 1900s which most of these firearms that we're restoring were blued with i'm gonna i'm gonna wipe this on the steel first coat and this is gonna dry for about an hour or so then we'll wipe on a second coat and then after that second coat we're going to introduce the uh treated barreled action into a humidity box and at that time we'll we'll start to accelerate and induce rusting and after that we'll convert it back into pipe and we should have a nice blue black on this steel now a point about applying this chemical most people apply way too much uh this is not like applying a cold blue where you just slop it on and then wipe it off and then rinse it you need to put just the barest amount of this on on the steel and the best way i can tell you to approximate that is think of yourself as taking a a magic marker and wiping it over a piece of paper that's the kind of layer you want you no drips no runs no sags you just want a sheen uh uh film wiped on the steel and when you're doing a long piece like a barrel you need to you need to start and get the whole length at one time if you can you don't want to with barest of just barely overlap so an important thing then to note here is is that when you're applying this chemical this is not a coat like bob said you're just putting the chemical on and it only takes a little bit and you're just provoking the steel to start reacting with the oxygen in the atmosphere that's all you're doing here exactly right so you want to wet your cotton ball and then and then if you have to squeeze out the excess which i've done and you can see we just got a barely dampened cotton ball and you'll need to recharge this every so often as you as you run and so first thing i do usually i'll run around the muzzle real quick hey bob while you're working how many guns can you typically do out of a bottle of that rust blue keep going i mean this this little two ounce bottle believe it or not will do about 20 long guns nice nice i'm going to put that's how little you have to use and right so this does not have to be dunked in a tank although i'm sure the armory guys just had a tank with about 3 000 gallons of that crap in it and they went for it that's exactly right we're not armory guys and we're not funded by the united states government therefore we have to use shall we say less fiscally invasive methods nice nice even strokes as he's applying from top to bottom just swab it on now as you can see we're not covering anything so prep is 98 if you can see it without the chemicals on it you will be able to see it with the chemicals on it you're not going to hide anything however this gun is 100 years old so we're not trying to make any apologies for it it is what it is and um you know we're just trying to make it look good put it on under the stock line as well as on top of the stock line because good craftsmanship dictates that if you knock it out of the stock it should look like you gave it down below to stock line two this first setup we're going to allow it to attack the steel for a little while there's enough moisture in this room that it'll start to attack the attack to steal then we're i'm going to admit to the fact that bruno and bob and i are going to go run out and grab something to eat right quick meanwhile while this is going on the acura glass is setting over there on the stock i've got the lamp on top of it i've already made you watch the epoxy set once i'm not going to make you do it twice we're going to go visit a guest forge and have them forge us some hamburgers and when we come back we'll pick this up again which for you will be right about i don't know now okay back in the shop we've uh we've coated our barrel with a priming coat of rust blowing solution we let that sit for about an hour and dry then i re-coated it with with the first primary coat of rust blue solution now i'm going to take your attention to uh this highly sophisticated device here this is my grand moving wardrobe drying chamber uh humidity box high speed every most everybody's got one of these in the attic somewhere you can run down your u-haul dealer and get one but i use it because it's convenient and it works and it was cheap the price was right uh i've got our barrel that we've we've treated with our second coat of rust blue right here and we're hanging it on the crossbar and first of all we're going to close close shop up here and we're going to heat this and the reason we're going to heat it with dry heat is that what we want to do is raise the the temperature of the metal to the point where it's well above the dew point because right afterwards i'm going to introduce a source of steam by way of a of a of a child's vaporizer you can i picked this one up at local pharmacy for 17 bucks new you could probably find one yard sale for a dollar low drag also going to be using a common ceramic heater this provides my heat source price was right on that too now one modification you need to make to the box is is a is a doorway in the bottom and all you need just take a razor knife and cut yourself a door out and then cut a little half moon shape here to get your finger in and that opens up just like that this allows you to introduce your heat source and your steam source into your box so now i'm going to go ahead and cut my heat on and i'm just going to put it there just like that and these boxes there's enough gaps in them they'll they'll naturally vent so we're going to let that work for about five or ten minutes and then we'll come back to you we've been in the hot box now for about 10 minutes so what i'm going to do now is is remove our heat dry heat source cut that off and down here i've i've got our i've got our little moisture pot moisture provider which is our little vaporizer and we're going to control the conditions under which this metal is rusting so by getting it hot we've heated up the metal so that none of the water condenses on it it makes these pretty little polka dots all over everything yeah you toasted yourself with the cord bob i did let me straighten that out for the camera yeah let's do that because it's important the electricity doesn't like to flow through knots no it doesn't the number one cause of death amongst electricians is falling off of ladders remember that boys and girls oh there we go all right so now we're going to wait in the steam it's going to continue to check this steam is going to fill this chamber up and and we're going to now just let this we're going to let it uh ripen as they say it's going to be obvious it'll look like fuzz like it'll look like brown frog hair fuzz yep and uh so it's gonna take about 30 to 45 minutes and we'll rejoin you no brown-haired frogs we're harmed in the process of making this video all right well it's it's been a little over 45 minutes we're actually coming up on about an hour and 10 minutes uh due to conditions but we we do have some rust forming and i want to go ahead and now i'm going to take this barrel out barrel action and we're going to put it back in the steam pipe and get it converted look at that sucker man i think it's jet black dude most most of the white spots have already turned jet black uh if you hold the barrel at a sharp angle to the light and i know it's difficult the next impossible to do that here on the show today but uh you can see a fine frog hair rust all over the barrel and i don't know on camera it looks black but but there is a fine brown frog hair rust yeah yeah that's awesome and i've got to tell you something else in that 45 minutes we haven't been just sitting here um i've been i've got my hands oily bob's got his hands clean so bob has been doing the small parts getting them ready to rust and i have been doing the uh small parts like the screw heads and everything with the burner and blue in it like we did when we did the screw so um we've used that time time is a tool professionals and amateurs the difference between a professional amateur is an amateur will expend time to save materials whereas professionals expend materials to save time in this particular case bob and i are ganging on this gun because we want to get it done sometime this decade so having said that i've got the oily hands bob's got the dry hands so the difference between white collar and blue collar is whether you wash your hands before or after you take a piss and i'm out of here okay so we're going to take our we're going to take our barreled action out and we're going to take it to the steam pipe and we're going to steam it under high volume of steam for about 10 maybe 12 minutes and uh when we rejoin you we'll uh the barrel will be cooled down out of the steam cool down and we'll be uh carting it and let you see the color okay our uh our barrel has finished steaming and as you can see it's got a pretty pretty modeled appearance there's all kinds of colors going on in there there's blues and blacks and purples and and all sorts of colors but that's just oxidation up on the surface what we're going to do right now is what's called card in the old days it was called scratching but carting is merely rubbing off the loose oxide off the metal with either a a wire brush as we did earlier a while a wire wheel or as i'm going to demonstrate here just plain old degreased um uh steel wool and i think this is like three ought steel wool uh just like you get at your local hardware store uh just make sure that you uh get some acetone let's get some acetone and do three washes of acetone and dry that steel wall out because steel wool comes packed with oil on it from the factory so what we're going to do we're going to start up here on the barrel and just merely again use nitrile gloves or any kind of glove to keep your skin oil off the barrel and we're just going to lightly start rubbing and i want you to look at that color coming out there look at that look at that black right up under that loose oxidation you got that black ooh that's some sexy shit right there and i'll check that out okay and even though there was some a good bit of blue and still on this barrel uh it would have been very hard to spot glued it and let it all blend in so i went ahead and coated the whole thing so that everything's going to have the same texture after that chemical works on and that's the difference between rust bluing and just regular rust regular rust forms a very large grain it's very flaky what we're doing with our chemicals is controlling the size of the grains we're also controlling the environment under which it rusts and since we're only rusting it for a very short period of time it has an opportunity to oxidize but not pit it doesn't dig down into the steel and that's what produces this nice lustrous finish it's the same thing if you'd have grabbed like a wrench you left out in the garage that got rusty and you scrubbed it all down and all of a sudden it's a dark color that's exactly what happens all right there you go and later on we're going to treat this barrel we're going to immerse it in some kerosene right that's going to be our final uh treatment process and that will that will make this at least two shades of garlic at least the oil hey in a word on after oils guys the first coat of oil you put on this gun cannot be gun oil gun oil has rust inhibitors in it and we've just spent the last four hours of our lives trying to rust this thing so we got to make sure that we can hit we dunk it in an oil that has absolutely nothing in it kerosene is that kerosene also chases any residual water molecules that might be mud catting underneath here and knocking all that out so just be very very careful can i put gun oil on a freshly blue gun it's got to be like um a non-detergent old motor oil actually works really well too for your for old motor oil stuff that's actually been in an engine for three or four thousand miles and it's had all the detergents burned out of it um i've got about a five gallon tub of that crap laying around here we use just for that okay so i got a pipe sitting over here in the corner that's full of uh it's kerosene what we're going to do here is just dunk this thing down inside the kerosene and let it sit there and let it cook for about you don't have to do this step i prefer to do this step it's just um i think it toughens up the bluing better ordinarily you just let the bluing set overnight you'd be just fine while bob's been working on the bluing i've been taking care of i don't know if you can see down in here hang on a minute let me get there you go i've kind of fixed this entire crack there was a beautiful crack that started right here at the stock bolt and as you can see worked its way all the way back up here to the end of this uh of the bolt release cut that was flexing so what i did was i made a tangent cut dropped the bolt down in it acro glassed all that over i also did the same thing on the fore end the forend was cracked all the way through here we saw that during tear down and i i just glassed that back together again and then stained it so that it it looks it looks correct when you're looking at it we're just doing armory level repairs okay the other thing i did when you flip this stock over and take a look at it here let me get up in here you see all this nastiness right here all this blackness there's a lot of uh oxidation staining now a little bit of four odd steel wool and some kerosene produces a stock that looks like this we didn't remove the finish all we did was we took the oxidation off the outside of it we've cleaned this up this still has finish on the outside of it it still has a couple little nicks and pops but this is where i'm going to leave it because this is all it would have done in armory level maintenance so we're just trying to bring the gun back and i think we're doing okay on it so this is kind of what i've been doing while bob's been blowing you've got two guys hacking away on this pig i'm going to tell you what the other thing we've been doing is we've been going through and doing the screws if i might have one just pick the biggest one you can find there you go we've been going back through and i've been cleaning up the screws i've been making the screws let's see here i got to be in focus against something white there we go i've been doing the screws and i went through and cleaned them up blew them got all the mung off of them before i blew it i went ahead and took a hammer polished hammer faces remember went ahead and took a hammer and pushed all that metal back down in tap tap tap tap right and got the screws cleaned up i'm doing the barrel bands i did the bolt release i did a whole bunch of things to it um stuff that you wouldn't want to rust blue because it would just take too damaged time oh my god but the most important thing is is that this is how this would have been done originally anyway now they would all have been set on a tray with a little bit of oil on them they just stuck them in a furnace that'll run them up to about 490 maybe 500 degrees they would have all relatively heat treated and it would have put a coat of finish on it that would hold up until the first time you started scrubbing on it and then the whole thing would turn white and then your uh the the oils in your hands and the salts would turn the whole thing brown and it would look like what it looked like when we walked in here all right just a little bit of cleanup here the akra glass on the inside and then what i'm going to do here is make sure that the the action fits down and then the forehand was split the foreign was split and all of this mess right here got chewed up because the foreign ring could not seat so we got the crap beat out of it so what i've done now is is not only am i going to fix the fact that the foreign was cut we're going to fix why the foreign was cut whoa root cause analysis you know so that's all i'm doing here is i'm tightening this up and then let me get this vise pulled down here so that it won't move around on me uh we're gonna set this in uh oh did i do what i think i did i sure did that came all the way off okay saliva causes cancer but only swallowed in small amounts over long periods of time okay um let's see here so we'll do this and then uh leave me a favor and hand me the foreign over there please the the the guard the for right there the wood by the by the red handle outstanding thank you sir so this is gonna have to eventually sit right here one of the beauties of this gun was was that it was never modified and it's still in seven by 57 miles or this is gonna be a shooting full when we get done with this so this will have to sit down right there and when i'm here to figure out is why it didn't sit that should be pretty close to going down in there note that as we've blew this and we haven't waxed it yet but as we blew it one of the biggest tenets of this is to not screw it up in the first place we did not come after this with 60 grit sandpaper we didn't come after this with a full on wire wheel we didn't come after it with a lot of things we didn't even take the original bluing off of it we just rusted right over the top of it so we got enough work to do without having to create a bunch of work for ourselves so right there is the problem that's what broke it so what i got to figure out is how to make this set back further and it's touching right there so i'll open up this inlet right here i'll just come in and i don't even know how the hell i'm going to do that i got to figure that out we'll come in with some chisels here and cut this out until this piece which is might have been a replacement piece we'll go back far enough that this ring or we in shot there that this lines up to right here and once that goes in notice i've done all this without putting all the other claptrap in place one of the tenets of inletting is is that you start one part at a time until you get all the way done so i'll just uh i'll go in and clip this off and we'll be back here once we get it put back together again the rest of the the rest of this is literally we're going to show you all the parts in there as clean and as uh conditions state then we'll reassemble the weapon and we'll catch you guys when it's all put back together again all right here it is we've got all the parts done we've been through this entire weapon now we've got it all the way apart down into its lowest common denominator we've torn the bolt down and completely re-cleaned it we polished the front of the firing pin because it had a little bit of a nick in it um we've cleaned up and re-blewed everything we fire blue most of it we rust blue the other parts guys i'm going to tell you something here why are we here this was an entire shop day with two gunsmiths that we did 600 worth of work on this gun i'm gonna tell you that and the thing is the average guy can't afford that and the average guy in the last three generations couldn't afford it either so here's kind of the problem we're having let's face it you own this gun because it was inexpensive okay the really nice versions of these guns are all in private collections are there in museums and that leaves the rest of this stuff out here it has not had the maintenance done on it because the uh massive government armories that used to take care of these things don't take care of them anymore and let's face it when this weapon was built no one in their right flipping mind thought 101 years later we'd have this thing torn down and laid out on this bench so here's the conundrum we're getting in the available mill syrup rifles are beginning to disappear because they're just literally rotting out you guys can do this maintenance it can be done you do not have to tear it all the way down the real issue is this who in their right mind is going to pay my shop what we've spent to do this gun and the only reason why we were able to do it is because we're being supported by individuals on patreon that's the only way we can afford to shut the shop down for a day and do this gun they're expensive i could probably have done it without all the filming equipment um and without bob's help in about five to six hours if i was humping it but let's face it no one's going to spend five to six bills on a 150 gun to have it brought back to life it's a conundrum it's one we face if you're going to do work and you want to take one of these things and modify it go out on gun broker go out on gun list and go find one that's been bubbed this was a parts complete weapon with a clean bore and all we have done is just gently done an armory restaurant for it we can do this we can save these things but at the end of the day they're gonna go away eventually and there's really not a whole lot we can do about it except to get educated and do what three generations of men be forest could not do which was figure out how to climb down inside one of these things and do what the armories used to do that's my rant that's where i'm at just saying another successful trip down the rabbit hole boy you gotta love that man we fixed cracks we did all kinds of stuff got the hand guard mounted good looking thing ross blue i'm telling you man this is the stuff right here we use about 10 drops of this a bottle of this is good for you and i don't know 14 or 15 of your best friends so bob thanks a lot for giving me help here and we'll catch you guys on the backside thanks a lot [Music] you

Channel: Mark Novak

Views: 159,798

Keywords: #anvilgunsmithing, @anvilgunsmithing, Mark Novak, Anvil, Gunsmithing

Id: O4QOcRTZv2Q

Length: 54min 10sec (3250 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020