Blued (oil blackened) versus Parkerized

[Surpmil]

Sometime I'll take some chunks down a local scrapyard and see if I can get them to run their spectrometer over them.

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[bigduke6]

Interesting thread, the best results I,ve ever had with traditional Bluing ( Rusting ) was cleaning the item in all manor of cleaning products, then actually using a sliced lemon to rub all over, left mother nature to do the rest, a few repeats and boiling left an excellent finish.

Parkerizing, I've never been able to produce as good results as I did when using the facilities of the ships galley and one of the cleaning products on board that contained phosphoric acid, (Unitor, Metal Bright)

Cold black oxide kits , can be used for some excellent finishes, you can match bluing using these kits, but its trial and error, the metal finish is the key to these kits, highly polished = light to very dark blue, Beadblast/sandblst using aluminium oxide or course media will produce a black matt finish. I,ve restored many bayonets and rifles using the black oxide kits, certain steels ( New Walther barrels in particular ) tend to rust very quick for some reason, the last few I did I just boiled these as in traditional bluing and repeated the cold black process.