Well, I've been trying to distract myself from all sorts of current issues and their ramifications. One thing that I have often failed at was flame bluing screws. I probably had the torch too hot and took them too quickly through the colors. I thought the other day that it would be nice to have fire blued slide blanks and I played around with it. The best results come from putting the slide blank on an aluminum block and heating the block with a torch, the block heats up relatively slowly and aluminum is a good thermal conductor. Once the desired color is reached, the slide blank is quenched in oil (10W-30 because I had some). Here are some pictures
A slide blank on a Lyman 35 base.
same but from a different angle, it is hard to get good pictures of this. But I think that the pictures you are seeing are reasonable representations of the actual colors.
The nice thing is that if you have a few slide blanks all polished and ready to go. Once that aluminum block is up to temperature, just put another slide blank on it. The above picture shows two super long Lyman 48 slide blanks and two Lyman 35 blanks.
