Jeweling Gun Parts

The term "jeweling" is also known as "engine turning" and "damascening." It doesn’t matter which term you use, as long as the results are the same. Jeweling consists of tiny round swirls that are evenly spaced, the purpose of which is partly cosmetic—to dress up the appearance of the firearm—as well as to produce a surface that holds rust-preventing oil. Work Preparation As with any other gun project, preparation is everything.

If parts are to be blued, it’s always better to add these swirls after the bluing has been applied. Jeweling shows up best on polished steel, and the more lustrous the polish, the more dramatic the jeweling will appear. I prefer to mask off the bluing with electrician’s tape before polishing a targeted area, as the tape will protect the metal that I wish to remain blued. This works especially well on the bolt bodies of bolt-action rifles, when the preparatory polishing is done on a power buffer.

The polishing wheel I use is charged with 555 Polish-O-Ray compound. I use a spiral-stitched muslin wheel, 8-inches in diameter with a face width of around 3/4 inch, turning at 3600 rpm. If a power buffer is not at your disposal, the area you plan to jewel should be polished with strips of 600-grit wet-or-dry paper. This should achieve an acceptable finish prior to jeweling, but if you’d like to take the polish to the next level, 1200-grit emery paper will give you a mirror finish.

On round parts such as bolt bodies, a "shoe-shine motion" done perpendicular to the centerline of the bolt body will get you there in short order. On flat parts, it’s best to put the paper on some sort of sanding block to maintain flatness. Jeweling Tools Once we have the parts polished and prepared for the engine-turning process, we need to select the tools with which the work is to be done. I’ve heard of this process being done by several different methods.

A wooden dowel with silicon-carbide grit embedded in the end can be used. Cylindrical rubber rods, called "Cratex rods," that have this same type of grit molded inside, are also used. These work pretty well as long as the part to be jeweled is relatively flat. However, when you try to work with cylindrical surfaces like those on a bolt body or a concave magazine follower, the flat faced rods leave much to be desired.

I prefer to use carbon-steel end brushes that are 3/16 inch in diameter with a 1/8 inch diameter shank. The wire end brushes conform to contours much easier than harder, flat-faced tools do, and on round bolt bodies that helps to blend the swirls into one another. Used as is, the 3/16-inch- Below top: A lustrous polish will enhance the effect of your jeweling efforts. Below bottom: The end result creates a nice appearance and has the advantage of holding rust-preventing lubricant better than a smooth surface.

diameter end-brushes will splay out to around 1/4 inch diameter once they come in contact with the part you are jeweling. In some cases, this diameter will give a disproportionate look on your work. For example, if you plan to jewel the sides of a hammer, the 1/4inch swirls appear too large for the surface involved. For smaller gun parts, I doctor-up the end-brush a bit to contain the splaying of the wires by sliding a small section of heat-shrink tubing on the outside diameter of the end-brush wires.

I use a heat gun to shrink the tubing, placed about 1/8 inch above the working end of the wires, thus constricting the wires into a tighter group. This keeps the wires of the end brush in a tight cluster that creates swirls of around 3/16 inch in diameter for those smaller parts. When I first began using the carbon-wire end brushes for jeweling, I experimented with various grits of lapping compounds that are mixed with oil and used to lap parts together that need to fit very tightly.

My first attempts were with 120-grit, and I learned quickly that this is too course and aggressive for what we need to accomplish. The other extreme, 600 grit, is just too fine and doesn’t produce the look I was after. The type I finally settled on is a 240-grit silicon carbide in a grease mixture, made by the Clover Manufacturing Company. The little end brushes hold this compound in the multitude of wires very nicely. The tiny wires don’t actually do the cutting, the silicon grit does.

This grease/grit mixture stays in place, and will not run off curved surfaces like an oil-based mixture tends to do. Spacing the Swirls The jeweling process must be done on either a drill press or a mill/drill setup. The brush needs to turn at around 2,000 rpm, and should contact the work piece as perpendicular as possible, or at top-dead-center on a bolt body.

When dealing with flat parts such as hammers or trigger sides, some means to move the part accurately in both directions will give a professional look to your work. Vises commonly referred to as "X & Y" vises can be purchased for a relatively low price, especially if one of the imported brands is chosen. These vises travel in both of the directions we need to space our swirls. The procedure is to create one row of swirls by moving the vise lengthwise half the distance of the swirl diameter.

Once a full row of swirls has been created, a bolt body will need to be precisely rotated to produce the next row of swirls. I made my own jeweling index er with some very simple stuff. A 120-tooth spur gear, 4-1/2 inches in diameter, was used as the basis to control the index spacing. A base plate made of cold-rolled steel, measuring 10-inches long by 2-1/2-inches wide and 3/8-inch thick, holds two plates of 1/2-inch-thick steel 3-1/2-inches high by 2-1/2-inches wide.

These two plates were clamped face-to-face in a drill press vise, and a 1/2-inchcontinued on page 22)

diameter hole was drilled through both plates 3/4 inch from the top and left corner of each plate. This process will somewhat guarantee that the two holes will align once we assemble these plates to the bottom plate. A spud was then turned to slip fit through the spur gear and press fit into one of the plates. This spud has a spring roll pin that is intended to fit into the cocking notch on bolt bodies and acts as the driver when indexing the bolt body.

A simple spring-assisted lever with around piece of 1/8-inch steel stock was ground so that it mesh es with the notches between the gear teeth, holding the gear in place after indexing. On the opposite end of this fixture, the other plate holds a finethread bolt that has one end turned to 60 degrees and acts as a center. The center fits into the firing-pin hole to keep the bolt body in alignment with the index gear. Most bolt bodies measure about .700-inch diameter, with a circumfer ence of around 2.200 inches.

Using the 120-tooth gear for indexing, each space between the gear teeth will rotate the bolt body 3 degrees, or about .018 inch along the circumference. Half the swirl diameter of approximately .200 inch is .100 inch, so indexing five spaces in the gear tooth will get us pretty close to the spacing we’re looking for.

The lead screw on the X & Yvise that I have has 9 turns per inch, so with one full revolution of the longitudinal-movement dial, the bolt will move about .111 inch, which matches the amount we index the bolt well enough for our purposes. Occasionally, I’ll run into parts with concave areas that complicate the process. One that comes to mind is the type of magazine follower with a radiused top that holds a cartridge during the chambering sequence.

I fashioned around aluminum bar with a center in one end and a hole to accept the driving pin in the opposite end. The indexing fixture is then clamped in the X & Yvise, and the follower is hot glued to the aluminum bar, striving to get it as square to the drill chuck as possible. These parts area little tricky to jewel because you need to rotate the part and then move the part using the "Y-feed" dial, as the part will rotate away from the end brush a bit. It can be done, however, as seen in the accompanying photo.

After you have your part completely jeweled, clean it thoroughly in a solvent. Any residual compound left behind will not treat that part kindly during its working efforts. Conclusions Jeweling is not a difficult process to pull off. Power buffers are indeed handy to have around, but you can do just as nice a job of polishing with the emery paper. And if you’re doing any serious work on firearms, you most likely already have a drill press.

With a little practice and a good eye, you can even eliminate the need for any indexing fixtures for jeweling small parts. One thing is for sure: If I can pull off a reputable jeweling job, so can you. ■