It's a legitimate question.
Yes. As far as I know I did it correctly.
That said, that was my first rifle and I was using a torch. So I guess it is possible that I just didn't get it hot enough on the rifle stock (perhaps for fear of scorching it). It was 30 years ago.
I also experimented with it on a 10" piece of sugar maple scrap. It blushed brown with heat, as it should. But after rubbing it back and finishing it, the final results seemed to me that it had a greenish tent. So I did not use it again.
Is it possible that it includes other chemicals besides Nitric acid and iron? Or that perhaps it wasn't made with pure iron?
Since that experiment, I've only tried using it aging iron. But I stopped doing that as well, because I found it was very hard to get it to stop reacting. For example, I put it on some lock bolt heads only to find that even after washing well and soaking in a baking soda bath, the bolt heads would still quickly grow another layer of heavy rust, just as if they had been in a sweat box. I cleaned them again and soaked them again, and even after that they still grew yet another thick layer of rust. And this was with them just lying on a shelf in the shop along with a dozen un-oiled barrels and piles of tools, which never rust at all. (Humidity controlled shop space.) Of course the obvious answer for the bolt heads here would be to oil them thoroughly, and to observe that this was a nitric acid stain designed for wood, not metal. So I surely can't complain if I'm using a product differently from how it was intended. Yes, I understand that. So at this point I'm just chatting about it.
Anyone have experience with this product?
