Questions regarding inlaying wedding bands on barrels.

[Rolf]

I want to inlay a 1/16"wide pure silver wedding band on a octagonal barrel. I plan to cut the inlay channel with a mill, undercut with a chisel and raise barbs with a graver.

1. How deep should the channel be?
2. What size of wire should I use?
3. Should I do the wedding band before rust bluing the barrel?

Best regards

Rolfkt

[David Veith]

I could have swear that in the Tutorial that jerry WH  gave a great one. Maybe it was on the old board. If I remember right they where not very deep. But any thing I would say would be a guess. Are you cold or hot bluing? If no more run a test on a piece of scrape metal
David Veith

[JTR]

Rolf,
It doesn't need to be more than about a 25 thousands of an inch ( 0.63mm ) deep. That's deep enough to make the undercuts without upsetting the metal on the surface if your're careful. If you cut the groove too deep, you'll have difficulty getting a graver in there to make the undercuts without maring the top edges.
If you cut 0.025 deep, use a wire about 0.040" ( 1.02mm ) diameter for the inlay. You could use a somewhat smaller wire, but 0.040" will fill the undercut and groove, and leave you some material to file off from the surface.
You only need to undercut about 0.010" ( 0.25mm ) or so, and for a 1/16" wide groove, don't really need to raise burrs, but certainly can if you want to be double sure the inlay stays in place.
John

[keweenaw]

Rolf,

These have to be done before bluing since the silver will need to be filed flush with the barrel.  I'm not sure about silver but I suspect that most bluing agents will tarnish it significantly and it will need to be carefully polished or cleaned after the bluing.  If you use gold and then rust blue with an agent with mercury in it the gold will get mercury plated.  The surface mercury must then be very carefully removed with some nitric acid on the tip of a toothpick or some such.  This needs to be carefully done since the acid will strip the bluing around the inlay.

Tom

[Acer Saccharum]

Use fine silver, or .999 pure, and it will not tarnish.
Keep your groove shallow. .025 sounds good to me.

[Rolf]

Thanks for the input. I'll use .999 silver, 1mm wire, grove depth 0.6mm.
I've orderd a copy of Angiers book "Firearm Blueing and Browning".
Hopfully, I'll find a good recipe for rust bluing without mercury. I want to avoid that stuff if possible.

Best regards
Rolfkt