First Gunsmith Projects

This article is aimed at someone brand new and just getting started by working on personal guns on the kitchen table. Based on the number of new people I’ve been corresponding with online, I thought an overview for getting new people with no experience that are just starting out would help. For you experienced gunsmiths, this would be a good article to share with a newbie getting started. So, you’d like to try working on your guns but aren’t sure where to start.

You don’t want to ruin your firearm, and you sure don’t want to ruin a friend’s, so, what do you do? For your first project, consider visiting the local pawn shops, gun stores, or gun shows and see if you can pick up a beat up old .22 single shot rifle. The worse the shape, the cheaper the price, and the greater opportunity you have to learn by doing. Ask your local gun and pawn shops if they have any guns in the back that are unsalable.

You can often pick up "parts guns" and things they can’t sell for a very good price. You might have to sign a waiver that states that the gun is only for parts or that you will not shoot it, but that is so they can protect themselves from being sued. The logo on the barrel gives us the model, caliber, and manufacturer. After sitting in a barn for years the stock was dirty, the metal rusty, and the parts were loose in a bag.

In this case, I acquired a rusty, beat-up Harrington & Richardson Model 750 single shot .22 that someone had taken apart and couldn’t (or just didn’t) want to bother reassembling. They placed all its parts in a plastic bag. The story I got with the gun was that it had been in the barn for years and it sure did look like it had. Let’s take a look at what you can do with a few simple hand tools and a minimum of investment.

Understand, this is not a how to restore an abused firearm to like-new condition, this is a project to get you started with minimum investment and finish with a presentable piece with plenty of good lessons learned. Starting with the metal, your primary job is going to be handling the rust, pitting, and any damage you find. The most common problem I find are corners of the metal where the metal has been impacted hard enough to cause a flat or burred edge.

Inspect the gun and use a file to repair any raised burrs and blend the edge back into the contour of the surrounding metal. Rust can range anywhere from light surface oxidation to deep pitting. Each can be handled in its own way. You can handle light surface rust with any good gun oil and 0000 steel wool. Apply the oil to the area and scrub with steel wool.

This will remove the rust but the rust will almost certainly have affected the bluing and you may well end up with a gun that looks pretty good when viewed from the back of a running horse several feet away but will look blotchy up close. This is caused by the areas where the rust affected the bluing being lighter in color than the areas that weren’t rusted. The severity of the rust will also remove more blue in some areas and less in others.

Moderate rusting is where the rust is no longer small spots on the surface of the metal, but now covers

an area in a solid blanket of oxidation. This requires a more aggressive approach. I like to start by buffing the rust off with a wire wheel on my buffer. That will remove the surface rust and allow you to access what needs to be done next. If you don’t have a buffer, a wire brush will do. If the metal is not pitted you can go back to the steel wool and oil method. However, the bluing will be gone and the metal is going to have to be refinished.

If the metal shows signs of having been damaged and there is light pitting evident you have several options on your next step. Any pitting, from light to severe, will show up if the gun is reblued without removing it. Once any degree of pitting is found you are passing from refinishing to more involved gunsmithing. There are several methods to remove the pits, or more correctly, to remove the metal from around the pits.

The first is to use abrasive cloth and actually sand the metal until you work your way down to the bottom of the pits. This is laborious, time consuming, and can be tricky. You want to try to save any markings and/or metal stampings, such as caliber, manufacturer, and/or model number. You also must maintain all sharp edges and not round them off. This is accomplished by backing the abrasive with a hard flat piece of wood or plastic. Probably the most common method of rust removal among gunsmiths is buffing.

This method generally uses hard felt buffing wheels charged with an abrasive and is powered by a buffer. This can be relatively fast and effective. The challenge of this method is, until you learn how not to round off edges, dish out screw holes, and keep flat areas flat you can ruin the value of a gun in a very short time. The felt wheels are also expensive and you will need several. Each wheel is dedicated to the coarseness of the grit with which it is charged.

You start with the coarsest grit, then work your way to progressively finer grits until the pits are removed and the metal is polished to a mirror like finish. The method I probably use the most when dealing with moderate to heavy pitting is draw filing. Draw filing is simply the process of using a single cut bastard file and holding it with the handle in one hand and the tip in the other. You place it on the metal and with moderate downward pressure pull or draw the file toward you.

The file removes metal and as long as you hold it flat on the work it will maintain sharp edges, will not dish out the screw holes, and can remove metal until the low spots and pitting disappear. Through the entire process you have total control. Once the pitting has been removed, I switch from the file to abrasive cloth backed a block of wood and work through finer and finer grits until I achieve the metal finish I want. In the most extreme cases, I will resort to bead blasting the entire surface of the metal.

If you do not have access to a blast cabinet you will need to sand the metal parts with 60 or 80 grit abrasive cloth until the pits blend in to the sanding marks. First clean up the pitted area with a file, leveling it off and blending it into its surroundings. Then blast the entire gun. This won’t remove the pitting but since the surrounding area is now frosted it can do a pretty good job of camouflaging it. After sanding or blasting the gun will have a dull rather than shiny appearance after it is reblued.

This is sometimes called a "Hunter’s Finish." The next step is to refinish the metal. Here, again, there are several options. First of all, understand that every scratch, pit, or flaw in the metal will show up through the bluing no matter what method you use, so be sure your metal is truly prepared to be reblued. As a begin-

Notice that close inspection shows the pitting under the finish. It looks pretty good, if you don’t get too close. ning gunsmith you almost certainly will neither have nor want a hot salts bluing setup. The process is fast, easy, and gives you the same color and protection as the gun had when it left the factory. However, it is also highly caustic, operates at a high temperature, and requires a dedicated place to do your bluing.

It simply isn’t a practical choice for the guy working on his kitchen table or in a basement shop. Most hobbyists and beginning gunsmiths working with limited space and tools use a cold bluing solution to refinish the metal. Cold blue options can produce a very nice color but, in my experience, they do not provide as much rust protection or wear resistance as more traditional methods. The most important element of any bluing process is cleanliness.

The surface of the metal to be blued must be free of oxidation, dirt, and oil. Blotchy or streaky finishes can almost always be traced back to the metal being contaminated. Wear rubber gloves to both clean the metal and Careful file work is required to bring it back to acceptable condition. whenever you touch it. Your natural skin oils can inhibit or prevent bluing. Follow the directions on the bottle! Different cold blue solutions work differently.

Depending on the solution you choose, the directions may be different than a solution you used previously. A better, but more labor-intensive solution to the bluing problem for the home or small shop is rust bluing. The traditional method requires a wooden box to hang the metal parts to be blued in with a light installed to provide heat and a rust bluing solution. Again, follow the directions supplied with the product. The upside of rust bluing is that it gives you a beautiful and durable finish.

The down side is it is slow, taking days or weeks to achieve the degree of blue you are looking for, and it is labor intensive. Fortunately, there are some accelerated rust blues on the market. Brownells Dicropan IM and Belgian Blue are two that come to mind. In that process you boil the parts in distilled water, then remove them using insulated rubber gloves. Remember, it just came out of boiling water and you don’t want to get body oil or burnt skin from your fingers on the metal.

Let the water evaporate off, then swab on the bluing solution. Once that has dried you card the metal, an old term for abrading the dried solution off the metal. Personally, I use a soft wire wheel to remove the dried chemical from the part but it can be done by hand with steel wool. Unfortunately, this is a method that requires several repetitions of this process to build up a decent color.

Depending on the alloy you may get good color in five or six coats, on the other hand you might need many more to achieve a good, deeplooking finish. The first time I tried this method, I used an old Coleman camp stove for the heat source and a metal chicken feeder as the water tank. If you choose to work on a handgun a large pot on the kitchen stove will work just as well. That is anything but a professional set up, but it works. When you have a good rich color, oil the metal part and set it aside to cool.

Yet another alternative to bluing, and one that is necessary on alloy or aluminum parts that cannot be blued, area variety of spray on, bake on, or air cured epoxy finishes. If you can use spray paint, you

can use these products with great affect. The trick to getting a good finish with any of them is to keep your coats light. If you lay on one heavy coat the gun is going to look like it was painted. Like virtually everything else in metalwork, good results require thorough preparation, careful craftsmanship, time, and patience. These products are generally available from Brownells under names like Dura Coat, Aluma Hyde II, or Baking Lacquer. Now, let’s move on to the stock.

As a beginner, this article is only going to deal with cleaning up the old stock, and refinishing it if necessary. There are a number of articles available through Learn Gunsmithing, The Troubleshooting Method and American Gunsmith back issues that discuss the repairing of broken stocks, raising dents in the wood, and customizing the stock by fluting the comb, forming a pistol grip, installing a grip cap, and the proper installation of recoil pads.

When you are confident in your ability and want to move on from basic refinishing to repair and customizing, I strongly suggest looking into those articles. Today, we are going to clean up that old barn find and leave the more complex stuff until you’re ready. Normally, on a dirty gun that has been lying around in a barn or shed long enough to get rusty, I will remove everything attached to the stock: buttplate, trigger guard, and stock screw in this case.

Then take it to the utility sink and give it a good scrub down with soap, water, and a brush. Once the stock dries it can be evaluated for damage and finish wear. This one had its share of dings and scratches and, typical of inexpensive .22 rifles, the stock is rather blocky. Unless you are going to customize it, minor blemishes are simply part of the gun’s history.

Personally, because I like the look of wood, I’d much rather have a walnut stock with a plain grain and some dings and dents than one made from a pile of old recycled milk jugs, but that’s just me. Most inexpensive .22s had a simple oil or varnish finish. In this case the stock was plain walnut with an oil finish. This is the time you have to make some decisions. Do you want to restore it to look like it did back "in the day", or do you want a shiny new finish on the gun?

In this case we are simply getting the feel of the work so I’m choosing to simply return it to its original look. In the case of an oil finished stock, I would suggest refinishing with a 50/50 mix of boiled linseed oil and turpentine as straight linseed oil takes months to dry. By cutting it with turpentine the drying process is accelerated and it can be handled and recoated in 24 hours. One of the most popular stock finishes out there is Birchwood Casey Tru-Oil.

It is an excellent product that is made precisely for refinishing gun stocks. A stock that has traces of an old varnish finish should be stripped with a good paint stripper and lightly sanded before applying any new finish. If using Tru-Oil, put thin coats on and allow it to dry per the directions before recoating. Heavy coats will run and/or sag and then require sanding down the run and starting over. Done right, after a couple of coats you will become a Tru-Oil fan.

It enhances the grain and provides a truly beautiful finish. Once the stock is dry, all that remains is to reassemble the gun and admire your work. Are you done? Not really. Although you have taken a dirty, rusty eyesore of a rifle and made it into a decent looking shooter, your work is that of a beginner. The pitting is still there, just hidden. The stock is clean and nicely finished but still dented, bruised, and blocky.

The good news is that you have learned a few things and you can start all over and practice the techniques of removing the pitting and customizing the stock without having to invest in another gun. I hope this project has whet your interest in gunsmithing and inspired you to learn more and improve your skills. AG