Touching up old betsy: tips and tricks for refinshing and preserving your firearms

Guns Magazine, June, 2003 by Holt Bodinson

Often when using a cold blue and the metal is not readily taking it, I will pre-heat the metal slightly with an electric hair dryer or heat gun. The additional heat speeds the chemical process and can get you over some bumps in the road.

Aluminum parts do not take a blue. They are "blackened." Birchwood-Casey offers a liquid product called "Aluminum Black." Add it to your kit because there's a lot of aluminum out there in gun parts these days, and this product really does a nice job.

While steel wool is the old standby and readily available at the local hardware store, I like to work with bronze wool. Available from Brownells, "00" bronze wool is wonderful stuff. It's not as aggressive as steel wool and more importantly doesn't break down like steel wool. I find it ideal for removing surface rust from blued surfaces and for removing strip-softened gunstock finishes.

Another great product for removing surface rust without damaging the underlying blue is a product Midway carries called a "Gun Brite Metal Cleaning Pad." This item looks like a kitchen pot scrubber, is made from stainless steel, and it works well when used in conjunction with a lubricating oil.

In any bluing process, you end up applying an anti-corrosion product of some kind--a good gun oil or polarized rust preventive. Two products I like and use extensively are Brownells Rust Preventive No. 2 and CorrosionX. More about CorrosionX later.

Newer Techniques

One of the products you will find missing in Birchwood-Casey's Tru-Oil Gun Stock Finish Kit is a wood filler. The open pores of walnut must be filled before a final finish is applied and traditionally, applying commercial wood filler was customary. No longer. Today, the concept is "wet sanding," and again, Birchwood-Casey's kit instructions are right up to date. The process is simple and logical, and I don't know why it took most of us so long to adopt it.

To "wet sand" you first saturate the wood with a thorough coat of finish and let it dry for a day. Then taking small sections of the stock, you apply more finish and sand it in with a piece of 180 grit wetldry paper, thereby creating a slurry of wood particles suspended in oil. The slurry is rubbed into the pores of the stock with your fingers and finally, wiped off across the grain with a paper towel. In short, the stock is creating its own filler, and the resulting color matches perfectly.

Plain black walnut is actually a rather light colored wood. To accentuate its richness, it is often stained in the process of refinishing. The Birchwood-Casey kit contains an excellent, water-based walnut stain that can do wonders to generate the warm, reddish brown tones we associate with walnut stocks.

To Refinish Or Not?

A word of caution is called for when refinishing. Many antique and high-value firearms have been desecrated by inappropriate refinishing attempts. The result is the firearm's intrinsic and historical value destroyed. You see examples at every gun show.

Antique firearms are particularly the victims of misapplied polishing, sanding, the application of erroneous finishes--it's enough to make you cry. When in doubt... don't, or turn the job over to a professional restorer.