Older Ruger Vaquero .44 Mag Stainless - Redux

Some time ago I acquired this used older (1996) Vaquero .44 Magnum, stainless steel, 7.5 inch barrel, with Ruger medallion faux ivory grips, and also a nice Ruger flap holster for a fairly low price. The catch was, cosmetically this old single action was looking a bit rough. Mechanically excellent but looking kind of beat up, and for me that was a great deal for some 'sweat equity' and low price, I thought I could make it look pretty close to new again.

When I first took it apart at home I was hoping for only a little cleaning and polish, but as always there's more wrong than meets the eye. In this case besides a lot of scuffing and scratches, I noticed (during some prelim hand polishing) the front sight was actually feeling loose and the brazing/soldering (which turned out to be an old repair) was broken loose. Then I also found the ejector housing screw was hard to get out, and then the housing tube itself as well. Turned out the threaded hole in the barrel was cross threaded a bit, and there was a lot of epoxy(?) type glue, rust and other gunk that was holding it together. Yeah the tube was also glued to the bbl...Oh my.

So I used a bottoming tap to fix the threads, cleaned and re-soldered the front sight, and super cleaned, hand polished with multiple grits of fine files and paper, and of course some metal polish, and got it looking good again. While I put in a ton of time hand refinishing and polishing, I did not try to give it a mirror polish. The overall finish I went for was in between a brushed and bright polish stainless. There were several surface blems that I just couldn't get all the way out, so a mirror polish would have made them way too visually obvious. It was a lot more work than I thought it would be, but I still think it was worth it.

I made a short 4 minute YT video which is actually is a gallery of pics (my Picumentary) showing the before and after of the blemishes and issues, and then the fixed and cleaned up images.

tbob38 said:

Errr, the music sounds a bit like a funeral dirge. Great job on the restoration though.

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Well think of it "The Resurrection of the..." , then maybe it's not as bad. But seriously, the choices you get for free use music on YT for certain time durations is a painful tedious (many selections worse than this) process and are tough to pick from especially late night/early morn when I can upload. Anyway, it sounded good at the time comparatively speaking.

czhen said:

Viper
Paying a second review to the pics you have done a very nice job soldering the front sight.
Thanks God mine sound solid, however do you mine to tell us how you did it.

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Best as I remember, (wish I would have saved more pics I originally took) the condition I got it was apparently loose/broke as it moved while I was wiping it down. As I really looked at it, I noticed a thin silvery brass colored slag type look all the way around the base of the front sight. Didn't look that close when I bought it. Using a 10x loupe it showed a crack all around plain as day. I just treated it like a loose tooth I had as a kid and wiggled it out with finger strength only. It was obvious who ever or however it was originally fixed(?) it appeared to have had loctite or glue, maybe both and then brazed or soldered without cleaning the parts up first. See the first pic.


I used a flat needle file (carefully) and picks to remove the slaggy metal from the blade sight and the notch in the barrel, and then stiff brushes acetone and steel wool to remove the loctite/glue residue. See the second pic.


They fit together nicely with just a smidge of play, so using an acid based flux and some med-hard silver solder I quickly and lightly tinned both parts. This created a friction fit for tapping the blade into the notch before final soldering.
Looking at the sight blade I noticed like an undercut on the center of the bottom edge, so I cut a tiny piece of solder slightly smaller than it and put it in the center of the notch in the barrel. Applied a little more flux and tapped the blade into the notch with a leather mallet until it was in to the max depth. placed a couple slices of solder in the top lines of connection, fired up a mini torch and carefully heated the area until the solder flowed all around. It was a bit much as I am not an expert solderer, but I'd rather have enough the first time and then clean and polish off the excess, than have to keep re-heating and adding I guess. I done it this way a couple times before on other pistols and it's held up. Time will tell in the long run. See third pic.


Then it was time for a very very careful and time consuming removing, blending and polishing the area. Believe it or not, it was all (carefully and slowly) done by hand with needle files fine grit sandpaper and fine steel wool in my state of the art finishing center. That would be my basement laundry tub..lol See fourth pic.


The fifth pic with the green background is mostly cleaned and rough blended.


The last pic with the red background was the final result blended and polished (took a couple hours..lol) by hand only. Not bragging about not using machines, but frankly I have more control by hand. I can and have used fiber wheels, buffers, dremels for a lot of stuff from time to time, but a lot of the time I just like to go slow by hand. It's kinda therapeutic sometimes, anyway..



So, like I said, I'm no expert nor do I even know if it's the correct way or not, but I've done it a couple other times like this over the years and those sights are still on after being fired many times since.