those barrels looked very good to me..charlie

Those barrels are among the best I have ever seen.

Bill,

I've had to change horses in midstream. Abbey's logwood at $2,730 for 10 pounds has pushed me out of the Oscar Gaddy and Dale Edmonds method of doing barrels. I too am rusting, boiling, etc. In the last four months I have discovered so many ways NOT to color barrels. I'm trying to discover what works best for carding after the Ferric Chloride etching. For the moment I'm sticking Carding with steel wool and dawn followed by bon-aim and sponge. Dale carded like this after the ferric chloride dip followed by a dip in Potassium Hydroxide to neutralize and to help remove the logwood from the lugs, etc.

Harry

Not a criticism of Dales work because he did a wonderful job for me on the sets of barrels I sent to him - one being a set of Bernard barrels that he refinished in pure black and white, but it took him years to finally perfect his method to a level of consistency. There was a very long learning period where he only was able to get them to come out light gray and dark gray. The learning curve is long and slow.






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I'm not convinced that what's on Amazon isn't just as good: powder, chips, extract. It certainly isn't that expensive. Same stuff as what's used to boil traps, so why not barrels?

The English was black enough without using it, but it was more labor intensive. My tank set-up is nearly operational, so I'm still going to try it, and give the Amazon stuff a try.

I have tried the Amazon logwood and the barrels turned black as my heart. With ferrous sulfate added they did not turn black. With ferrous sulfate after barrels were black the results were if I had carded after the first rusting. Carding the black barrels without the
Ferrous sulfate was just as fruitless.

Hey Harry. I'm a bit confused. Logwood for traps did, or did not, blacken? The ferrous sulfate did not help the oxide to release from the steel? I've got a barrel of my own to try soon, so I'll do some testing.

Bill,

I'm confused as well! I have five sets of barrels going and will try the amazon logwood in different form today on two of them. All I know about the ferrous sulfate and potassium hydroxide is what I've read in Oscar's articles. I have been reluctant to post about this until i was successful. I'll let you know what today brings.

Harry

How goes it, Harry? I'm still plugging away with the practice. Messing with a Lefever barrel now. I don't have an issue with the depth of black oxide in the crolle, it's get the steel white enough and regulating what how much is etched off that are my struggles.

I know how other fellows do it, and have followed suit in a very disciplined manner, but the steel continues to darken more than expected and confuses the etching times.

Finally had some good success. Still no logwood, and there were more iterations than I ultimately would like, but it feels good for it to be going better. This set was finished last week, and is from a Lefever G grade from 1894.