Tried Something New

[ArtS]

I was working on a guitar finish in my shop this afternoon, wet sanding a few coats of laquer flat before buffing. While I was working, I happened to think of the barrels on an 1874 lifter I bought. It has Damascus barrels which have a solid surface with no real boo-boos, but it is completely black and opaque. Only a faint outline of the pattern could be made out. I had tried rubbing with steel wool with and without oil, the same with Frontier pads and a couple of chemical products with absolutely no success. They never looked any different. I had another gun like this and 400 grit paper quickly took it off, but it went right to bare metal. That was OK since I needed to have them refurbished anyway. This new gun is intended to be a good solid original shooter.

It suddenly occured to me that I had never tried very fine abrasive.

When I finished buffing, I got the barrels and took a test rub with Norton 2000 grit wet and dry paper, dipped in water. The rust in the test area simply came off completely and was slurried in the water. I wiped down the area, then recleaned the area with a damp clean rag, followed by a rubdown with a water displacing and rust preventive lubricant. I looked really good so I finished the barrels except for the area under the forearm and flats. (I first tried a second area with the wet/dry lubricated with oil, but it didn't seem to work as well.) The whole cleaning took 15 minutes. The first picture posted is an uncleaned area (but not the worst; most of the exterior looked like the lower barrel) and the second picture is what it looked like after cleaning.


Maybe I am just unaware, but I had never seen any mention of using abrasive paper with the intent of restoring the finish vs just blocking it for refinishing. It turned out there was an incredible amount of finish left under the oxidation on this 148 year old gun.

I might mention that when I looked at the first picture, I about had a heart attack. It looks like the upper barrel had a huge crack I had missed. I checked the barrel and there is nothing there. There is some sort of discoloration in a streak that resembles a pencil mark, but no flaw at all. Somehow the lighting made it look like the Grand Canyon in the picture.