I had an interesting recent "bluing" experience. Last month I acquired a 1938 mismatched Luger - frame and receiver matched, but DWM toggle, mismatched side plate and trigger, one grip is numbered the other seems a wartime beech replacement, and wartime (or at least, long ago) re-barrel with a WWII era Mauser barrel. The receiver was marred by whoever did the re-barrel. Given this pedigree the pistol is a "shooter".
As the barrel bore and exterior are excellent, I explored getting the pistol cosmetics improved. I had the marring fixed, not 100% but the pistol looks much better. Due to the location of the marring it was a choice of lose the proof marks on the right frame or tolerate some marring, and we chose to retain the proof marks/tolerate some marring. Charles Danner did the work on the marring and r-blue of the barrel/receiver and he did an excellent, fast, and very reasonably priced job on it. Charles does rust blue, not salt blue, so now I have a repaired and re-blued barrel/receiver to go with the salt-blued frame which retains over 90% of its original salt blue.
No matter how hard I try, I cannot tell that the receiver and frame were finished with separate bluing processes. As a relative newbie to the Luger lifestyle, perhaps my eye is not trained well enough yet but for now - it was an interesting lesson in how similar the end product of both bluing methods appear.
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