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.
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.