One of the issues when trying to “decipher” period case hardening is the very few pristine examples left to review.
Take Winchesters for example; I’ve been collecting pictures of “minty” (80% or better) Winchester case hardening. I would say that I have possibly 80-90 pics, of nice guns with lots of visible, original CCH. The pics are of models 1873s, 1876s, 1890s, 1886s, etc, kind of a mish mash.
But if you look at the numbers; if I had 80-90 pictures of just the Winchester Model 1886, Winchester produced 160K of those rifles alone, that 80-90 example would be less than ½ of 1% of total production. Not statistically relevant by any stretch of the imagination.
Guess what I’m trying to say is that most folks will see just a few minty guns, then try and compare, or mimic their work to mirror those few examples.
Occasionally I will get the customer that wants “real” Winchester colors …like they saw in some book. Really irritates me. For those customers, I will e-mail pics of some originals that are so different you would swear they were done by two different companies. I also have pics of guns where one side of the frame is almost barren of colors, straw with a few hints of blue… the other side looks like Picasso puked; full of reds, greens, blues, all factory original.
I will then ask the customer which colors he wants me to replicate; usually at that point they get a clue, for those that don’t, I generally tell them that I cannot meet their expectations.
V/R
Mike
