doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Any one have experience with hot blued barrels?

+1 on Force 44 being hot blue resistant. I have had at least three different guns with Force 44 attached sight ramps that withstood hot bluing with no problems.

OB

Hi-Force 44 is a 96% tin/4% silver solder with a 475F melt point. While I was looking it up on the Brownell's site, I noted that there was no leaded solders shown. Anyone that predicts they will need lead/tin solder to fix their ribs should stock up if they can still find it.

My local hardware sells it, just not for plumbing. Stained glass is the main reason I believe.

Hi-Force 44 works well but any line of solder that shows along a solder seam like the rib to bbl joint will remain bright silver colored even after rust bluing.
Lead/tin soft solder will darken after the trip through the rust blue process and not be noticable.

60/40 or 50/50 works fine for rib work. Most any hardware store has it. I think Brownells just wants to push their HF44 product and doesn't carry lead/tin solder.
Maybe the lead content bothers some people with the 'go-green' PC movement,,,,can you even sell it in CA?.

Gov't Warning...Don't chew on the soldering wire while working with it.

Kutter,
I think it's still available in CA, just not everywhere. The eco-nazi's are pushing to get the lead out of everything.

Parker tinned their baarrels befor soldering. It was a coat of pure tin, very thin, my old friend (gone) Bob in PA had a tin tank for dipping them.
bill

Tinning is also a term for applying a very thin coat of soft solder. Usually to both parts before clamping together and then heating & joining.
Any Parkers I've ever had apart were only 'tinned' in the area of the contact between the ribs and the barrel surfaces, not the entire surface inbetween the ribs. Can't think of any make of bbl sets that looked covered entirely on purpose inside there.
Wouldn't be a bad idea to avoid rust though.

Kutter,
In the 1905 Parker damascus barrels I took apart, they were not tinned entirely between the ribs either. It's possible processes chnaged over the years. When I reassembled them, I fully "tinned" them with solder.

I did pull a late Hunter LC Smith apart that had fully "tinned" (obviously with solder) barrels between the ribs.

i don't think the melting point was as big of a consideration as the barrels, ribs,expanding and contracting together.lead was introduced in solder to prevent tin whiskers in electronic production.sight ramps are a little different than a two ribs with a nice air gap.i guess if what you use works then go with it.

One of the strangest ones I've had was a set of LCS bbls that had obviously been reblued before and needed to be redone again. The ribs were loose in several spots so I decided to strip them and start over.

Just when I got them hot enough to start pulling the ribs free,,smoke started billowing from in between the ribs. I just kept going and stripped the ribs off with the smoke alarms going and the place filled with what smelled like wood smoke.

Somehow, someone in the past had redone the ribs and had used spacers made of wood instead of the metal ones originally used.

From the look what was left of them, they appeared to be nothing more than pieces of tongue depressors stacked together to the right thickness in several places. Not unlike many of the metal spacers that are thin pieces stacked & soldered together.

All I can figure is they must have done the final soldering up job with an electric soldering iron to avoid setting the wooden spacers ablaze. My torch wasn't so kind to them.

I do use a general purpose electric soldering gun to tin the ribs and most of the length of the tubes. It won't do the last/heaviest portion of the tubes. But it does a quick clean tinning job of the rest of it though. So with a bigger unit, I'd guess the whole job is possible.

You never know what you're going to find in there....