Good or no good ?

[Patrick Chadwick]

"I'm betting the whole thing was red hot and then they quenched it in a pail of water. "

- Which could mean that the steel is now partially glass-hard where it was fully quenched, varying to dead-soft further along.

Even for me, that would all be far too "iffy".

---------- Post added at 04:52 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:46 PM ----------

"One of my books states that you can use an acetylene torch as long as you keep the temperature to the point that the colour of the bluing outside the contact point is not affected (the topic was annealing two (2) points on the top of a Mauser 98 receiver ring (notorious for being heat treated extremely hard on the surface, but dead soft internally) so that it could be drilled for tapping, and also involved using heat sinks."

Maybe the writer of the book would care to give you a guarantee? My local gunsmith once showed me a rifle where some bright spark had tried exactly that on a recycled barrel for use in a sporting rifle. So, by law, it had to be reproofed. The proof house turned it down as soon as they saw the receiver ring.