My 450° Tempilaq came in. Turns out the vendor I ordered it from is local to me, but the Tempilaq still drop shipped out of FL. No matter how Congress rags on the USPS, I love priority Mail service.
So I painted it onto my sacrificial cases, about 1/4" below the shoulder, then loaded it into a deep socket mounted in my cordless drill. For consistency's sake I opened up the propane torch valve all the way. I turned the drill on very low speed, maybe 3-5 RPM, and stuck the case neck in just above the point of the blue flame.
It took a slow three count to turn the Tempilaq black (it starts off as light gray). Then I dropped the case into an aluminum tray. As a precaution I had the tray nested on top of a second tray full of ice. It's not a big tray and I didn't want to be piling hot brass on top of each other.
Anyway, I ran ten scrap cases through the process to confirm the dwell time then proceeded to anneal cases for real. I only applied Tempilaq to the first two of these then just started counting to three before dropping them in to the tray.
On observation I made was that if the flame turned even a tiny bit orange I was about a count too long. Those resulted in the case neck turning a darker blue, but still having some shine to it. In the picture below the third case from the left is one that I left in the flame a beat too long.
So if you don't have Tempilaq try annealing some scrap cases and count how long it takes for the flame to flicker orange. Then back off one count with the next case and see if you get the proper case color. One thing to mention is that the color becomes more apparent once the case cools.
Bill did you paint the inside of the case or the outside?
how hard was it for you to remove the residual templiq?
for mine the tumbler didn't do that great of a job.
I look forward to the update on how they did after firing them, your method is easier from what it sounds like.
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