doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Anyone use Birchwood Casey-Plum Brown?

When I was digging out my alkanet root stain and Original Oil Finish and Tru-Oil to refinish the stock on my new muzzle loader I found a full bottle of Birch Wood Casey-Plum Brown-Barrel Finish that I bought for an earlier project but never used.

I have some questions:

1. Is it any good?
2. Assuming it�s good, the directions say to heat the barrels to 275* F. The best I can figure is that the solder used on the barrels has a minimum 370* F melting point for 60/40 solder (but it could be as high as 621.5* F for pure lead), giving me at least a 95* F safety margin. BC recommends heating the barrels in an oven, unfortunately they don�t fit in my little RV oven and at over 30� I doubt that they�d fit in most normal sized ovens. What have others done? I hesitate to use a torch and risk causing localized hotspots.

Just asking these questions is making me realize why I didn�t use the stuff earlier. I'm afraid I have two major sins I deal with, sloth and gluttony. My inner sloth is starting to get upset, I should go get something to eat!

Steve

I've never used Plum Brown but know guys that have. Some of their jobs turned out well, and some were blotchy. Same as any other method, I guess it depends upon technique and attention to detail. I have only done slow rust browning using formulas from Angiers book or John Bivens. How old is your bottle? I recall reading that the early version contained mercuric chloride. I think the current version is mostly dilute nitric acid, so either way, I doubt if it would lose effectiveness from just being old. I have read that the fumes from it will clear out a room in a hurry if it is applied at the full 275 degrees F. Supposedly, it works just as well if it is swabbed on barrels that are brought up to temperature in boiling water and then applying the solution as soon as the hot barrels have flash dried.

Steve,

When I used to build m/l rifles I used it. It worked fine for me. I just heated a large old coffeepot or kettle full of water to boiling, poured it down the barrel as it stood upright in a bucket. This heated the barrels to nearly the temp of boiling water, probably close to 200 degrees. Worked fine for me. I tried a second application of boiling water to a barrel one day, in order to reapply the solution. When I hit it with the boiling water the second time it turned a very nice blue/black ............... not what I wanted!

SRH

Thanks for the help guys. I hadn't planned on refinishing the barrels until I found this old bottle of Plum Brown in with my stuff. So far the stock refinish is coming along well so I guess for now what I'll do is pattern and shoot the old smoke pole to see how it shoots. If I decide it's a keeper then maybe I'll brown the barrels. I used to have a Parker with browned barrels and they looked very nice.

Stan, from what I understand if you just give the black barrels time, like 100 years or so, they'll turn brown again!

Thanks again for the help.

Steve

Much quicker than that. I've had unprotected barrel segments turn back to brown in about six months or so.

I have used it to restore the brown color on an old double action where a nick forced me to remove and polish metal to get rid of marks caused by abuse. It does a nice job of hiding the repair when a recolor job does not make sense. Cold blue is also used in this hide the repair trick.

bill

I used it years ago (1980?) on a CVA cap lock pistol kit and it came out a beautiful even, dark, purplish-brown, on that particular steel. Would love to try it again, if I could only find that old bottle!