Quote:
Originally Posted by Dean Romig
Dave - Did Brad actually do every step of the case color process or did his people do it?
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Dean,
When I started working for Brad 10 years ago he was not doing any color case hardening in house. He sent most of the work to Don Menk at the Color Case Company of Ohio. My family's gun shop had just closed the year before and after I was working for Brad for about a year we sold our color case hardening equipment to Brad and Lori. I believe this would be have been around 2007-2008 when I started helping him get the process down.
I had experience with the process from my family's shop. We obtained great results following the rough steps per Oscar Gaddy's DGJ articles. During my time at Bachelders I was in college and did most of the double gun metal polishing and color case prep. I would mix charcoal, fixture parts for the crucible, etc. Brad liked to pack the crucibles and quench the parts. It was a tremendous joy for both of us to pull a receiver out of the quench tank and rinse it off to find beautiful colors under the shielding. We would often work late because we would run batches of receivers in one day. When all the receivers were done we would line them up and compare colors and patterns to benchmark guns in our reference books like The Parker Story or the DGJ.
After four years I graduated college and left Bachelders and I think we had run at least a few hundred receivers by then. I'm sure Brad would have brought others in the shop up to speed on the process as its easier to run with helping hands. His oldest son Carson didn't seem too interested but maybe his younger son or other employees were taught the process. Somewhere I still have the original list of all the receivers that were run when I was working there.