Hi,
In his 1801 book "Cautions to Young Sportsmen" (available on Google books), Thomas Frankland gives credit to William Bailes as the first to use case-hardening colors on his locks. Bailes died in 1766. Of course that would be the English perspective. He also relates that many sportsmen were aghast when servants cleaned their guns too vigorously and polished off the case colors. From that passage I infer that case colors were very common by 1800 and many guns in collections today with bright polished lockplates may have originally had colors.
dave
Thanks for the citation.
I will have to break down and read Hanger sometime.
There was a citation, on this web site I think, in the last few months of some maker, perhaps in France doing colors on locks in the 18th century, mid IIRC.
As I stated before if charcoal hardening is done RIGHT there will likely be color that will need be removed if the desired color is shiney. The same is true of cyanide. Though cyanide was NOT used in Colonial America and likely not until the mid-late 19th century and the only thing common in the two processes is the heat and the quench.
There are others, here, who have reported finding colors on the inside surfaces.
But given that colors can fade rapidly and wear with frightening ease. Not finding colors on guns is not surprising.
So if the part was charcoal hardened it may have originally been colored. But if they screwed up the quench and let air get to the parts as they dropped from the pack they might be so ugly as to require polishing.
So if the parts were case hardened it probably came out of the quench with some color on the part.
Was the color such that the parts were uniform or was the job done in manner that required it to be polished off for cosmetic reasons. The choice is yours.
But from Dave's post and others it appears that colored locks and surely other parts may have been more common than many would like apparently having subscribed to the shiny lock side of the argument, something that was "fact" before anyone bothered to even look into it adequately.
It was an assumption that became fact.
Casehardening apparently goes back 2500-3000 years. I found this in a 10 second search of the WWW.
http://www.touregypt.net/science.htm"
One which has fortunately survived presents several points of interest: it is an iron tool from the masonry of the great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, and thus presumably dates from the time when the Pyramid was being built, i.e. about 2900 B.C. This tool was subjected to chemical
analysis and was found to contain combined carbon, which suggests that it may have been composed of steel. By 666 B.C. the process of case-hardening was in use for the edges of iron tools, but the story that the Egyptians had some secret means of hardening copper and
bronze that has since been lost is probably without foundation."
Then
http://www.oakeshott.org/metal.html"Carburizing wrought iron is often referred to as case hardening and has been known to metal workers from antiquity.13...."
"13. Williams, Dr. Alan R. & K. R. Maxwell-Hyslop, Ancient Steel from Egypt, Journal of Archeological Science, 1976, London."So thinking that casehardening was some new process even in medieval Europe is simply myth.
Dan
