Won this rusty locked up S&W 1917 snubbie at auction yesterday

[shep854]

Bill, that kind of patience is mind-boggling to us mere humans! True craftsmanship, awesome to behold.

 

[Bill_in_fl]

Bill, that kind of patience is mind-boggling to us mere humans! True craftsmanship, awesome to behold.

Thanks Shep, glad you liked it. But anyone can do it that has the inclination to, as long as they get a good set of jeweler's files, different grits of automotive wet/dry sandpaper and have a buffing wheel and use different grits of buffing rouge. It ain't rocket science. But it does take a lot of time and patience. A little experience helps, but that can quickly be learned and you get experienced doing one or two guns and then you never quit learning. I know I don't. Back in 1976 I was a sheet metal mechanic at Piper aircraft building and repairing wings for their Piper Navajo's and I got real used to working with aluminum and steel. So I had that experience advantage, plus been working on guns for probably 40 years now. One thing I had to get over at first when I first started working on guns a long time ago, was fear of jumping in and messing up the gun. But if it is a mess already, there's not much you can do to hurt it unless you totally ruin it. You just have to trust in yourself and have confidence in yourself that you can fix it, and then not give up until you do.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention this part. I realized I needed to sand evenly all the way around the cylinder to get that chemical etching out of the metal on it, and wanted to do it the fastest and most efficient and evenly way. So I found a bolt close to the cylinder's arbor hole, and two steel washers and two rubber washers (so no metal was directly contacting the cylinder). I tightened up the nuts so the bolt, steel washers and rubber washers firmly held the cylinder and chucked it into my mill like this.....

My mill head will rotate away from my mill vice like this.....
(Sorry, these two below pics are a little blurry).

Then I wrapped some wet/dry sandpaper around a 1x2 piece of wood, wet the sandpaper, and held that firmly against the side of the cylinder as it rotated.

What would have taken me hours to sand by hand I accomplished in just a short while with wet 220 grit sandpaper. I was successful in getting every last speck of chemical etching off of the cylinder. Plus the sanding was perfectly even doing it this way. I hand sanded the flutes some and then used a dremel with a very small buffing wheel and coarse rouge to get into the flutes since I couldn't sand the flutes using the method of sanding on my mill.

Then I used some 400 grit and then 600 grit wet sandpaper using the same method to get an even smoother finish on the cylinder to get it ready for buffing with rouge.

Next I gave it a medium grit red rouge buffing followed by a fine white grit rouge polishing on my buffing wheel. It is now starting to get that perfect mirror finish on it, but not completely yet. No etching nor sanding marks are visible now, but it isn't quite the perfect mirror finish I want yet. Just a leeeetle tiny bit hazy. So it will take a time or two more of buffing to get it perfect, but it is definitely getting there.

I don't view it as work, it's my hobby that I enjoy doing. But there is NO WAY anyone could pay me enough to do that for other people for a living. I can't count how many hours that I put into projects like this, that my time and labor would exceed the value of a customer's gun. Plus my hands get sore from filing, sanding, and holding parts while buffing them. That's why you have to do these things yourself, because it would be too expensive to pay someone else to do it.

But occasionally I do work on relatives and close friends (shootin buddies) guns, and don't charge them for it. I just don't advertise that I do it and try not to make a habit of even doing that. I don't have enough time to finish all my own gun projects as it is.




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