Monkeyleg
Member.
slick6, it sounds like whatever is causing those bumps is coming from underneath the nickel plating.
Plating--whether nickel, gold, or chrome--needs another metal to bind to the steel surface first. Usually it's copper. From there you can add oodles of plating of different metals until you reach the Holy Grail of chrome plating: the triple cupro-nickel chrome that I had done on the bumpers of my 69' XKE. It was like gazing through The Looking Glass.
Sorry, I digress. It really sounds to me as though a previous owner used an ammonia-based solvent to clean. Ammonia will cause the copper plating to lift off the steel, then the nickel follows.
It may also well be that the Colt platers let some dirt or gunk get on the gun before they started plating it. From what I've seen of their work from that era, it's probably not likely. If the plating were done by any of the Big Name Harley custom shops that do custom plating on pipes, etc, around here, I wouldn't be surprised. I've had pieces of chrome the size of silver dollars just pop off due to poor prep work.
If you're able to pick off specks of nickel plating with your fingernail, then you're probably going to see more plating coming off later. Take a good, close look at the gun with a magnifier. If you see more tiny cracks or breaks in the plating, you're probably going to see those flake off as well.
Oh, and for those purists who think that a blued Python fetches more than the same model in nickel: The auction results on gunbroker.com prove me right. Nothing attracts the eye like a pimp-nickel Python.
Plating--whether nickel, gold, or chrome--needs another metal to bind to the steel surface first. Usually it's copper. From there you can add oodles of plating of different metals until you reach the Holy Grail of chrome plating: the triple cupro-nickel chrome that I had done on the bumpers of my 69' XKE. It was like gazing through The Looking Glass.
Sorry, I digress. It really sounds to me as though a previous owner used an ammonia-based solvent to clean. Ammonia will cause the copper plating to lift off the steel, then the nickel follows.
It may also well be that the Colt platers let some dirt or gunk get on the gun before they started plating it. From what I've seen of their work from that era, it's probably not likely. If the plating were done by any of the Big Name Harley custom shops that do custom plating on pipes, etc, around here, I wouldn't be surprised. I've had pieces of chrome the size of silver dollars just pop off due to poor prep work.
If you're able to pick off specks of nickel plating with your fingernail, then you're probably going to see more plating coming off later. Take a good, close look at the gun with a magnifier. If you see more tiny cracks or breaks in the plating, you're probably going to see those flake off as well.
Oh, and for those purists who think that a blued Python fetches more than the same model in nickel: The auction results on gunbroker.com prove me right. Nothing attracts the eye like a pimp-nickel Python.