If I may add something as well that might be of interest to all here,...in the past, I had all kinds of witches brews made up, some from Angier's book, one came out of Piotti in Italy,.. also tried some that were given to me by Oscar Gaddy,... all gave pretty good results but the thought of working with all that mercuric stuff sure didn't appeal to me very much any more,...so in a bid to work in a safer environment and live a bit longer so I can enjoy the shooting sports in my later years,...I decided to settle for a product that at the time I thought might not be as good but was at least not going to kill me in the long run
I have for years now been using nothing but Laurel Mountain Brown for all my rust bluing and browning work,...I like the fact that it is "supposedly" non toxic,...I can also say that once one learns to manipulate it's strength (through dilution) and get control over the entire rusting process a complete range of finishes can be achieved with fantastic results,.....I also think that a hygrometer would be a good investment and contrary to what has been stated before, I find that prepping to a higher degree of finish is not always a waste of time
If you polish to a mirror finish and you're careful with the application of the rusting solution and time allowed to rust on,.....you wont get a mirror blue but you can get pretty close,....
CJ
