SHOP TIPS #277 Gun Bluing the Toolmaker's Clamp tubalcain

howdy is to volcano once again and in the last video numbers to 75 and to 76 I showed you how to make a tool makers clamp and this one I'm going to show you how to color it or blew it and I'm going to give you two different methods and it just looks a little unfinished without being glued or coloured in some way and it'll quickly rust and I'm not so sure how quickly the or how permanently the the bluing will prevent rust but you know rust happens is but it'll look better so let me show you my method of blowing it and first I'll show you what you need get yourself some birchwood casey perma blue and there's variations of this in different color but this is probably the most common one is available at any sporting goods store I think I got this at Bass Pro Shop and it's about 11 bucks even though it's only a dimes worth in there but be careful when using chemicals wear gloves I'm going to wear gloves mainly so I don't get oil on the project but my old skin can take this is harsh chemicals but they sell a whole kit of this and in the kit there's going to be the bluing and there's going to be oil and there was going to be degreaser I don't believe you need all of that but of course they're going to recommend that you use it but that's that's up to you but otherwise use some other kind of degreaser and detergents to clean the work thoroughly after it's been polished and then just some isopropyl rubbing alcohol will clean it nicely and then gun oil or three-in-one or something for your final finish also it's handy to have cotton swabs and I borrow this stuff for my wife you don't know about it cotton balls q-tips or whatever walgreens calls them or a swab I like these swabs I've had this in stock I don't know where you get them but there I know they sell them at tandi's leather store if they still have at Andy's leather store I don't know what I think that's where that came from and some clean rags and would be nice if you worked on some cardboard or something you can throw away or lose paper so let's get started on this I'll show you what else I got out here this is just a jar clean water this is a test tube or whatever you call it from a chemistry lab and I put some bluing in there so I can try dipping the threads rather than swabbing them this is a bluing in here and do not return any of these chemicals to the bottle because they will be contaminated and this is alcohol I got to tell a story first though you know what Burma blue of course virtual cases will tell you to use all their products but when I was a kid we'd make model airplanes all the time this was probably in the early 50s and they were balsa wood yet but on the direction that cost a dime and then the glue was a dime but on the directions it said use testers glue for best results well my dad came home with some other brand then and there my mom I can't use it that got their own kind as your wife he said well it says you got to use testers and mom said no no no it doesn't matter what kind you use are just trying to sell and scam you so you know I learned a valuable lesson back then okay as long as use quality products now I polish these in the other video I think you remember that with the sandpaper and you can go back and look at that I'm not going to talk about that but you know you want to have a polished clean project to start with and then you might want to scrub it with detergent and hot water and then blow it off and if you use hot water it dries quickly so that's a good advice now I don't do this all that often so that you and there's a lot of gun makers that watch this so I'm sure you're going to find things I that you disagree with but you know this is my method and use whatever method works for you so I have already washed polish degrease at and again I'm not a big polisher as you know I just I don't like doing it so I don't spend a lot of time on it so that's good enough and I'm going to clean it now with the alcohol and then I'm going to blow it off but if you blow it off make darn sure that your compressor doesn't spit out a little bit of oil as some new or you're going to get blotches so get that real clean now I'll go over and blow this off and notice I got some way to hang on to it here just by putting a bolt into the thread and once you clean that don't touch it with your bare hands because even if you think your hands are clean they're not they're oily from human oil not just the oil you may have picked up in the shop now using q-tips and this has been cleaned off and blown off again and had to wait for my compressor to build up and boy I'll swear my compressor holds its charge for about two minutes and now a q-tip is kind of small so depending on the size your work you may want to use what I totally hear a swab I like that little better covers more area now remember this is a chemical reaction that's taking place and this has been 2 or 3 minutes and it probably would happen a little faster if I had warmed the work remember any chemical reaction is speeded up sped up made faster by heat if you remember your chemistry and I don't remember much of it there it's getting a really nice black appearance and it has to work for at least a minute or two not but not too long then we want to stop the reaction and I'm going to do that by immersing it and the in other words rinsing it real good and then it's handy to have the water right here I'm not sure whether hot water is better or not I haven't done all this much but look in the comments and I'm going to let gunsmiths comment on this although they probably use better chemicals than this or use the hot process but we can't get into that and some of those old processes that you see on guns were a sign I booing that is absolutely gorgeous and but we can't do that anymore because all the men that did it at Winchester died it's getting a rather nice black finish now you can do this repeatedly but but then you need to use some triple steel wool between coats and it's rather Laborde that I'm just doing one coat because it looks pretty dark I'm happy with that I'm going to blow this off and then right away I'm going to oil it and the oiling is really important just like you would or a gun its dried off and for best results use only starett tool and instrument oil rub that around real good real well I should say because good is an adjective that should only be used to modify nouns if you remember your freshman English or whatever was and Miss Ivor's who could be quite mean so I'm boiling it up real nice and I'm going to wipe it off but she had to be mean because there were so many mean kids in class so she wasn't acting she was reacting little blotchy on this side I didn't work that side very well because it was underneath as you remember and I don't care about it anyway but what with the light and all here I know I know that's not going to show up but it looks pretty nice I must confess now I believe I'll do that other piece off camera because it's strictly a repetition before I tackle the screws and I'm very leery about the screws because they are made of screw machine stock which contains lead and I'm just wondering if if it will take the bluing I'm just finishing the second piece now make sure you get some way to hang on to this thing in this case I'm using that little threaded hole here with a 6:32 screw and on this little piece I dipped it but within the bluing and in the water now that's ready to dry off and oil and I was going to stop the reaction on this if it'll fit then it did not auto set for about a minute now I'll tackle the screws I'm simply going to dip the knurl in there and see what happens taking the black pretty well or should I say blue well you know you can get this in brown color too I think and they make it for aluminum I have not had too much luck with that to be honest with you and then for the screw like I told you unless that wood graduated chemistry deal here see what that'll do if anything without spilling too much of it wow that was a stroke of genius I must confess it certainly works better than the swab and you know I scrubbed this with a fingernail brush hot water and detergent for quite a while then I cleaned it with alcohol and even before that I cleaned it with some with brake cleaner or something the other day to try to get the oil off because there's so much oil on this piece now remember that this these chemicals have to be thrown away and disposed out properly or the EPA will be very angry at you so dispose of them properly tip that end a little bit and I want to let it work at least a minute that really worked better than messing around with this swab which I know would leave a little lint on it to the q-tips leave lint this chemical process is not something that children should do so make sure you're over 18 before you you mess with any kind of chemical and if you're a smoker and I hope you're not you know it wash your hands you don't want to have anything on your hands and then you know get near your mouth wash four times before you eat and then wear rubber gloves but that's what it looks like when it's done I got oil on it yet now if you got a lot of blotchiness that means you didn't have it clean enough and there's a few blotches on here this a little screw was plated so I didn't do that I suppose I could have tried to remove the pleating but that's good or not I like to say those knurls really took it nicely in that now don't go away I'm going to show you one other little method to give a color by-the-by a heat method basically to get the tempering colors but it may be at a temporary color now you can do this more than once but don't boil it before you do that in other words repeated coats I told you that a minute ago and read the direction and I think you can even go on to Birchwood Casey's website maybe and get more detailed instructions on how to work with bluing so I hope you like that but stick with me for just a few more minutes another way to achieve this rather superficial color is is just by heating the work up and getting the tempering color now that's around 600 degrees and I think you've all looked at these color charts and know what this color is all about but by simply taking a shiny work and it doesn't need it even need to be oil-free for this I'm just going to put it on a hot plate now you could do it with Torche but when you do it with a torch is hard to get it uniform so I like this little laboratory plate that I'm using here so let's take a look at that and talk a little bit about heats I guarantee that absolutely nobody that's watching this has ever seen one of these but it's called a thermal plate and and it's really I guess use in physics labs or chemistry labs I don't know even know where I got it but since you don't have and this can be heated up and the temperature here is well these are just arbitrary numbers like 1 2 3 4 doesn't tell what the temperature but I have found by practice that I want this on about 6 and 1/2 and right now it's hotter than a pistol but you can do the same thing on your kitchen solve just with an aluminum or even a steel plate but it'd be so nice to have something uniform in in temperature now how do you get the right temperature well have you ever seen a temple sticks temple sticks are available in different temperatures and when you you touch it it's almost like a crayon when you touch the crayon there it will liquefy when you're at that temperature and this one is a 500 and there's a 450 and about a 550 so looking at this to see about what the temperature is now with a 550 C it melts very readily this is available in liquids also and in any temperature you want but maybe you never heard of these so I'm about at the right temperature now so let's give it a try with a sample piece first go to the internet and look up tempering colors and you probably will find a color chart that's most interesting but you know we're pretty hot here we've got some dancing spit but the first color that starts to come in is what we call a straw color and that's just that it's kind of a tan or brown and then it'll work its way slowly into blue and I really need a little more heat here for this so I'm waiting for this but it's like waiting for water to boil but can you see the straw start to come in and these colors is what was always used by by heat-treated years ago before they had modern instruments they could go by color and so that's been known for hundreds of years but do you see that the blue star going to come in just a little bit this would be a good place for time-lapse photography now when it gets to the right color and a problem won't be all that uniform and there I'm sure there's hot spots on this plate as well because there's coils in there like I think but then I will there's the straw color with a little blue coming in then I will quench it now if you go over that heat and you have it on there too long it's going to go back to the just plain steel color and to me there's some beauty in those maybe you don't agree and you can do that with the torch I'm not getting the blue area and this video is getting way too long that's kind of what I'm looking for on this other piece not too bad of a color I'm going to quit right there on question how's that now here's the clamp itself and this piece I just put on this has been on for about two minutes and finally this this plate is up to about the temperature that I want and the the colors came into the thin part much sooner than it came into the thick part and that's what I was trying to explain with the torch it's really hard to get it uniform this color is only skin-deep but then again so was the cold blue think I'll quit on that piece at the risk of boring yo I'm going to let you watch this color coming in also but just speed it up here if you don't go for this you know we live at such a fast pace life ever people want to speed everything up isn't that Purdy you can see how it got darker on this end first now I've got the screw layin out there whether or not that's going to do anything I don't know but it needs to conduct and I was a little bit off of the plate there so that the entire thread could conduct the heat up properly all right I'm going to take this off and I don't believe this even needs to quench I think I'll let that cool naturally just to see what the difference is using the plate to try to do the screws with quite a failure because this isn't close enough to the plate it's held up by both the knurl and the thread so I went with Plan B here and I'm using the torch but it's very hard to get it uniform and why it didn't turn on the end there is a mystery to me but this process is simply done with you and that piece is already pretty heated just a little bit from being on the place and I've done a gave up so from this experiment you can see that it looks a lot better by conduction on the plate at the earth is flat or square now this can be done in an album and usually is it he treaters of it but I do not have one see a color coming that's better than the other one where they showed you I'll call it quits on that this video ran about twice as long as I want it as I'm becoming more and more verbose in my old age but let's take a look now here's the one done with the Birchwood KC Chemical and here's the one with just the poor man's method of heating it up and it isn't bad looking is it so you can do it either way if you ever get this far or have a notion or you just find this interesting now in a big factory they do the hot bluing and they have all different kinds of methods of coloring but then again they have a whole laboratory and they've got a crew of chemists and ingenious along that subject so that's not something that I can do at home other than this the simple method so I hope you enjoyed this make sure you watch the two other videos before this that show how I machine these and and this is one was strictly to finalize it so hope you liked it watch my many other videos this is a tubal-cain saying so long for now and please subscribe thank you for watching

Channel: mrpete222

Views: 101,175

Rating: 4.943038 out of 5

Keywords: mrpete222, south bend lathe, bridgeport mill, drill press, LYLE PETERSON, LOGAN LATHE, SHERLINE LATHE

Id: _D6NK7x-uI0

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2016