A quick shooter project
 

Found a cheap shooter at the TMCA show, nicely buffed into a jelly bean and blued over the remaining rust pits. It was not really worthy of a full restoration, so I put a better upper on it, straightened out the worst boo-boos on the frame, rust blued, installed new springs and called it a day. It could have used some spot welding and other detail work, but I didn't want to put too much work into a mismatched shooter. Found a brand new set of grips that I believe is for the Interarms Lugers, the 16 lpi checkering looks a bit off but it gives you a really good grip when you shoot.

It turned out to be a great shooter, the trigger is smooth, the action is solid and it shoots really straight. Like I needed another shooter, but anyway... :)

By he way, the finish is my "cheater rust blue": I prep the parts as usual, but I don't bother with small nicks and pits. Then I blast the parts lightly with 100 grit, smooth them on the carding wheel and then I blue with Mark D's special concoction. This gives me a slightly duller finish than a "normal" rust blue, which helps hide small imperfections. Works well on quick shooter jobs like this.

Nice looking shooter

Good work Ollie.

Wow, that looks great. I'm wanting to try the rust bluing but am afraid to start on it and really screw things up.

Then try it on a plain piece of steel - you don't have to start
on a luger!

Would I be okay to try it on an old receiver of some sort or will the different types of steel give me different results?

When you are refinishing a gun that is not numbers matching and is not being restored, do you reblue the internal parts also? Did you use the file in the picture is preparing the frame? Did you also have to use emery cloth? How fine do you go? I know this is a lot of questions but I have not done anything like this before. Thanks for your patience.

There's no need to reblue any internal parts since they're in the white, so it's just a matter of cleaning them. I do refinish "semi-internal" parts though, like the safety bar, pins and such. The safety bar is in the white, but it will usually look much better if you clean it off with wet or dry paper.

The sides on the frame were rounded off from the previous reblue, so I used a large draw file to flatten them. The rest was done with misc files and wet or dry sandpaper. 400 grit is usually fine enough for the final polish, it leaves the surface rough enough for the rust to get a good bite. I sand blasted this one, but it's not really the standard procedure.

What do you mean by "in the white"?

Do you normally strip it before doing the sanding/polishing? I could see where the old bluing could help you see imperfections still in the metal.

Bare metal....no finish at all

Okay, that makes sense.

IMO, it's better to strip when you're done with everything but the final 400 grit prep. The old bluing works very much like the black mist coat car painters use to find imperfections, so once you start filing or sanding you'll see the bad spots in all their glory. If you look at the pictures, you'll see what it looked like when I started filing and when I was done. The old bluing around the perimeter shows that the surface is slightly rounded from a previous polish, so once it's all bare metal you know it's flat again. You just have to use a good file and be very careful to keep it perfectly flat with the gun. The flat surface on top of the rear toggle was also rounded, but on this I used the milling machine and a grinding stone to get it flat and square with the rest of the toggle.

Of course, in this case I didn't have to strip it, since I blasted it instead. Some people don't strip at all, they just prep and blue over any remaining bluing. Haven't tried it, but supposedly the rust blue will work even if there's spots of old finish left.