USFA Rodeo shine-up experiment

After looking at another thread here I wondered how hard it would be to shine up the matte finish on a USFA Rodeo. After a couple of glasses of wine it seemed like a better idea than it really was.... So I wandered out to the shop.

Step One: Tried buffing with Flitz. Nothing much happened.

Step Two: Tried buffing on my bench buffing wheels with super fine grit. I looked a little better, BUT the USFA matte finish is very hard and seemed to be resisting.

Step Three: Tried medium buffing compound. This was too much and went down to white metal. Now I was in trouble.

Step Four: buffed all the old blue off with medium and polished with fine on my other buffing wheel. Now it looked like it was nickel plated.

Step Five: Degreased with MEK, the fumes made me see Elvis.

Step Six: Heated to around 200 degree with my big heat gun and applied MARK LEE Express Blue with cotton patches. It is now rusty red.

Step Seven: Place cylinder in boiling water for a few minutes. The red rust is now black.

Step Eight: Card off rust with fine steel wool. ( degreased steel wool with denatured alcohol)

Kept repeating steps 5, 6, 7 and 8....

Step Nine: The next day the sunlight showed that the base color of the blue was red. Probably from using my well water.

Started all over again but used rain water.

Soaked with oil. It is OK and much more glossy than the matte finish. But it will never be as tough as the matte finish.

Applying the blue and boiling. This was the third application. The shop lights and $80 camera do not show the underlying red tint in the base blue. The MARK LEE blue is great stuff and very tough, BUT you need to use good water and boil it longer than the instructions direct.

Finished re-blue. I could have gine longer and done a couple more coats today, but me wife came home and said she wanted to start cleaning my shop since I was out there. SO..... I had to quit and four blue applications. I used rain water the second time around.
The photos are not so swell. But you can tell that the cylinder is now much more glossy than the matte blue original finish on the rest of the gun. Now I need to do the rest of it.
I was thinking about trying color case hardening on the upper frame.

I rebuffed the whole thing,. That Mark Lee stuff is pretty tough ... And then started all over with rain water. Plus I boiled it for 10 minutes at a rolling boil. No red undercoat now.
I might add more layers latter. It actually looks ok right now. Too many things to do and not enough time.

Yeap, there is no good reason to mess with the factory finish. I let curiosity get the better of me.

yugorpk:
Having things shipped here tends to get complicated. I only happened to have a couple jugs of the Mark Lee Blue because a friend drove it up through Canada with him. Nobody else up here had seen any. I just wanted it to experiment. It is OK, bu since it requires pre-heating and boiling afterwards, I might as well go with the warm damp box method. IF I can get the chemicals required.

Does UPS not ship up there?

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Only UPS air. So no haz-mat or anything they think is haz-mat. I recently wrote an article for Fly-Low magazine where I describe trying to obtain an aircraft ELT battery. The battery is made for aircraft use and is required aircraft equipment. BUT, the USPS, FED-EX and UPS would not send it via aircraft to Alaska. Obtaining real Black Powder is a pain in the butt.

As an alternative to the rain water - rain water is still tough to keep contaminants from.

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I was not sure how much water I would need, so I skipped driving into town and buying $5 a gallon distilled water. It was raining pretty hard ( Why I was not flying, or working on the plane) so I just dipped water out of one of our rain barrels.

Our well water looks pretty good compared to most wells around our area, but it did not agree with the chemical process. Plus I think that I over-buffed and the Mark Lee stuff does not do so swell on a mirror surface.

I will try distilled water next time. I need to drive or fly up north to Los Anchorage sometime in the next month or so, it should be a lot less expensive up there.