Gold insert front sight

[B.Habermehl]

I’m a proponent of brass front sights for hunting, especially with the rear face of the sight tipped foreword to catch early morning light rounded to generally barley corn profile viewed from the side.
 Has anyone after sighting in and fileing the front sight to height. Tried to face the rear face of the front sight with a bit of scrap gold? Can it be soft soldered or does it require hard soldering? I have a project on the bench envisioned to be my last best hunting rifle. The front sight is one piece of my so called check list. BJH

[smylee grouch]

I have never used Gold but I have cut a very narrow slit length ways in the sight and fluxed and filled it with silver solder so when viewed you see a bright silver dot.

[Steeltrap]

I have never used Gold but I have cut a very narrow slit length ways in the sight and fluxed and filled it with silver solder so when viewed you see a bright silver dot.

I'm getting there faster than I want.

[smart dog]

Hi BJ,
The front sight of the rifle below is a sandwich of mild steel sheet and very thin gold sheet soldered together.




I use low temp silver solder.  Before shooting, I coat the sight with instant blue and then wipe off the gold with a rag impregnated with a tiny bit of simichrome polish. It is one of my favorite woodswalk guns because the sight is clear in sun or in shadow.

dave

[dieselmech570]

Yup, I finally found a good use for my wedding ring from my first marriage! I cut it in small chips With a Jewelers Saw, and silver soldered small chip in a notch I filed on the back of each front site of all of My Flintlocks

[kutter]

Gold & old alloys will soft solder to steel very easily.
Just as easy to solder it as to work with brass.

I use Lead/Tin soft solder for something like this as opposed to the newer Soft 'Silver Solder' (Tin/Silver alloy).
Either will work just as well.
The Tin/Silver soft solder stays forever bright white and I don't care for that bright white solder line betw the steel and the gold Facing, Bead or whatever attachment you are putting up.

Lead/Tin will oxidize in a short time especially if the steel part is Browned or rust blued. So no Silver line next to the gold.
A small thing but I guess it's one of those things called a detail.

If you do solder or inlay on a Gold (or Brass, Copper, etc) facing, inlay, bead or whatever to a sight or other part and then plan on Express Rust Browning or Rust Bluing it,,make sure you don't use one of the older formulas for the rusting process that contains any Mercury compounds (generally Mercury Bi-Chloride was the favorite).

Those rusting solutions work great, but the Mercury in them will Plate out onto any non-ferrous metal like your brass, gold, etc as you apply them. Especially if the parts are warm as in the Express Rust process.
The Mercury is plated very tenaciously to the brass or gold and does not just rub off. Carding will not usually remove it either.
Careful polishing can remove it but is a real pain and often damages surrounding new finish. If there is engraved detail in the inlay , that usually has to be re-cut.

Best to stick with a non-merc rusting soln in the first place.
Slow Rust soln's generally didn't have any merc compounds in them.

(It was used to touch up worn nickel plating in some instances on brass parts. Works pretty good for that.)

[Ghillie]

Be careful of mercury compounds.  My wife had her wedding ring pitted by picking up mercury from a broken thermometer.  The jeweler told her mercury dissolves gold.
I used to think a German silver sight was the best.  However, after seeing a copper front sight on an 1874 Sharps I changed mine to copper.  It really shines in low light and is not blinding in bright light.  Seems to work in all lights especially low light in the woods.  You might want to give it a try.

[kutter]

Merc forms an amalgam with gold (and several other non ferrous metals).
The merc breaks the bonds/links of the gold in this instance and forms an alloy with the mercury.
No heat or other outside help is needed. Just contact and enough mercury to do the job.

It also works w/ silver.

Some back water gold mining operations are still done in out of the way places in the world by the use of mercury amalgam process.
The gold rich soil is sloshed around in pans (steel) with a quantity of mercury poured in with it.
The merc amalgams with the gold grains and dust forming clumps.
The clumps are easily separated from the sand&mud soil by the panning method.
The steel 'pans' are not effected by the mercury as steel & iron do not form an amalgam with mercury.

Then the clumps are seperated of the mercury by simply burning it off,,vaporizing it by heating the clumps of amalgam with torches.
That leaves the pure gold behind..the mercury in left to the air, soil and surrounding water.
It was also a common way to mine in this country many yrs ago.

[Daryl]

I like my brass bead on the .69. Made this sight in 1986 and it still shines beautifully in low light and is easily blackened for shooting targets in the sunshine with s touch using erasable felt pen as this creates a FLAT BLACK sight  not shiny black as with a perm. felt pen.
With a touch, the flat black covering is removed.

[smylee grouch]

Thanks for that informative run down Kutter.

[Daryl]

I used to use mercury for cleaning lead from my ctg. Lead bullet rifles. I'd plug the muzzle and pour the mercury into the bore through the breech, seal the breech with a peg and slosh it back and forth a few times, then pour the mercury back into the bottle.The result was a clean bore.
1 Ed's Red patch and done.

[AZshot]

I've been thinking of learning to electroplate in silver when I do my Kibler SMR front sight.  I notice almost all of my anique southern rifles have a brass wedge for the front, but the actual BLADE is a silver barleycorn.