Gun Bluing, Case Hardening, Wood Restoration

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Hello, my name is CJ and I’m with Colorado

gun restorations. I thought we would do a video on one

of the guns we’re storing which is a

Remington model 12.

that’d be fun to see the process for

people that don’t know what’s involved

with restoring a gun and often it takes

a month to two months to restore it

and you’ll see through this process why

it takes so long

sometimes to do these projects

this guy we’ve already disassembled it

and checked all the parts everything

is safe and in good working order so

we’re just going to clean these

sandblast them re-blue them and they’ll

be like new ready to go

for the wood, the wood’s actually in very

good shape so we’re going to refinish

the wood

and I’ll show you different stages of

the process it starts with

sanding 320 grit

wet sanding and then moving on all the

way through

1500 grit then let it dry another week

and we’ll do a hand rub out that’s one

of the reasons it takes so long it’s

about a month to

sometimes six weeks to just redo the

wood

the reason we’re restoring this gun has

extensive pitting on the receiver

so we’ll put this on the surface grind

grinder we’ll grind it flat again

we’ll be careful to make sure that we

don’t lose the model 12 in the serial

number

as this is just going to cost extra

money to have it re-engraved in

same with the barrel we have good

printing on the barrel so we’ll refinish

the barrel we’ll work

gently around those numbers and letters

and make sure that we retain

all the original print

so with the wood

one of the reasons we do try to keep the

wood is I’m working doing another model

12 where we couldn’t save the wood and

I’ve had to

duplicate uh a new stock for that gun

and you can see that it’s quite

extensive to drill these holes for the

draw bars

in the proper place and finish the wood

you end up putting a lot of money

into it. it’s beautiful when you’re done but

we try to save the wood if it’s in nice

shape because

the wood will look much prettier when

we’re done with this gun it’ll be

and it has that hundred-year age to it

that is hard to duplicate so it’ll be

worthwhile saving that wood so I’ll be

back shortly

with the gun in a little bit different

order and you’ll see

that the receiver is just about ready to

go the barrel has been pulled off and

the wood will be in the first stages

of restoration

hello welcome back we now have all of

our parts

that we’re going to clean up right now

with the media blaster finished

and we this gives us a better view of

the pitting the extensiveness of the

pitting on the gun

and this gun’s actually in pretty good

shape compared to most of them that we

see

one thing to note is the trigger on

these older Remington 12s I’m not sure

when they switch but at some point they

did start bluing them

the older ones are case color hardened

so if you take a file to it you’ll see

right away that it’s considerably harder

than

the rest of the seal on the gun so when

we do another gun in the next week or

two we will throw this in

and we’ll refinish it and then throw it

in and case color it again so it’s

the same as it was originally

with the magazine tube you want to make

sure that you clean the inside of it out

it has 100 years’ worth of

gunk and oil and just about everything

in there we want to make sure that that

works well again

and we’ll re-polish the brass tube that

goes inside will re-blue the

the end so that it is all refinished and

working just the way it did when it came

out of the factory

the barrel is in pretty good shape it

does have its maybe difficult to see

but has light pitting throughout the

barrel so

a few hundred thousands and we’ll have

that cleaned up and looking

just like it did coming out of the

factory

with the receiver we put our dial

indicator on it

and this is one that checks in a few

thousands

and we can see that the pitting is

anywhere from

four to I think I found up to seven

thousand deep

and the engraving is also about the same

depth 7000 steep

so upon reflection

and after looking at this a little bit

further we’re probably just going to

take it off flat with the surface

grinder make it look like new

and re-engrave these numbers they’re

pretty simple numbers

and letters to put back in so the cost

isn’t nearly as much as it would be on a

fancy Winchester

or Marlin that has to have

a lot more engraving put back into it

we’ll try

to angle grind it and sell it set it up

about

four or five thousands high on this side

and see how it looks

but most likely we’re going to lose too

much of that to retain

the serial number so I’ll get back to

you as soon as we’ve surface grind

the receiver and cleaned up the

barrel and started polishing the parts

and getting them ready for the boiling

tank

and we’ll check back in with the wood

when it gets to about 800 grit

thank you welcome back

a little bit of an update on our

Remington model 12.

we’ve taken this side

to the surface grinder you can see and

because these are cast they’re not

perfectly flat anyway so you can see

this is now perfectly flat

within about 1 10 000

of an inch and I didn’t keep taking it

down to the edge so

when we finish this by hand by sanding

by hand with a block

we’ll run that off and it’ll be smooth

you won’t see that anymore

but we’ve retained all our lines and the

parts perfectly flat now it’s going to

look great

on this side is a little bit more

complicated

we were able to save the serial number

because the owner

decided they would rather have this gun

case colored

so because we’re going to case color it

having a serial number that’s

faint is not as important as if you blue

it

because the colors will blend and it’ll

be difficult to see the model

12 anyways so we had to actually put the

gun up about five thousandths

grind this way from left to right to

take out this deep pitting up here

and then also the pitting on top turned

out to be about three to four thousand

steeper

so we had to grind it deeper across the

top towards the bottom and that’s why

you can see lines in it right now

and also the brown is caused by the

wheel loading up a little bit

so we’ll go out to the shop and we’ll

start blending this by hand we’ll blend

these lines

from the bottom to the top flat and from

front back

flat and we’ll work around the number

and then when we case color it will

still have the model 12 the serial

number and it should look great

as for the stock

we have that now to

actually a thousand grit it was just

done this morning so it’s drying I

probably shouldn’t be touching it but

I’ll wipe it back down but it’s very

smooth now

and it’s flat because we’re wiping it

off in between coats we haven’t started

that hand rub out yet

but this is the original stock

and you can see that it’s taking on a

new look it has the old patina

but it’s going to start to take a

three-dimensional look on that it would

never come out of the factory with

because of the process

that taking and refinishing it

well beyond what a factory would ever do

so we’ve got about

uh three weeks into this right now we’ll

do

1200 1500 grit we’ll let it sit for five

to seven days we’ll do the hand rub out

so we still have about two more weeks

check back and we’ll have all the parts

finished and ready for

bluing at our next step

hello again we are back putting together

our Remington model 12 that we’ve been

refinishing now for a couple months

so I wanted to leave it open so you

could see inside

and understand that when we restore a

gun we don’t just restore the outside of

the gun we restore every part so that it

works

as advertised and that it’s safe to

shoot again

any parts that aren’t safe we either

remake them or purchase them

so we can see

that these two parts is that really

interesting the way the model 12 works

when you hold it back like this you can

take out the

locking block it’s got a little groove

on the top there and it falls into a

hole

it’s pretty easy you just put it in

follows into that hole go back

grab it and it pulls it back and forth

anyways all these parts are working

beautifully again um

they get gummed up over time they get

sand and grit and it’s amazing what we

find in there

uh this gun is good to go it’s been

polished well beyond what it was

at the factory we did case color just to

make it a little bit different

the wood’s been refinished to 1500 and

then hand rubbed out and let’s sit for

about two weeks now it’s been you can

see the sheen it’s a beautiful

wood

this is original 100 and some year old

very plain walnut that we made it

look like you can’t even make new wood

look like that

it’s very interesting how this comes out

and you’ll see that

when people look at it they’ll never be

able to tell that it’s been refinished

other than that it’s more beautiful than

original

because we don’t over sand here like

people often do they get

crazy they sand and then you can see the

metals proud to the wood we just make

sure we don’t do that that’s why it’s a

little darker here because we blended it

from the center towards the front by the

time you sand it finish it and

everything it

looks really nice so all the internal

parts again

they’ve been blued you can see that the

hammer is still a little bit red

it probably could use a little bit

longer in the second tank because it’s

the hammers hardened

so it’s an internal part we don’t see it

it’s been sand blasted

all the parts have been sandblasted

cleaned and blued so that they won’t

rust

if you take care of it you know get

another 150 to 200 years out of it no

problem

we polish the brass tube

so that everything it probably wasn’t

even that shiny when it came out of the

factory

um and everything functions great so

we’ll take it out and shoot it before we

send it back to the owner

and I don’t foresee any problem we do a

lot of these Remington model 12s

thanks for watching the video and hope

you enjoyed learning a little bit about

the restoration process on a gun

and why it takes so long you can’t do it

just in a week

and how you can really make a plain

old cheap gun

quite beautiful for years to come