I only very occasionally do I rust blue barrels now though I do touch up the odd worn spots on my own guns. I did stop barrel bluing for a couple of reasons toxic Mercury Salts and other rust bluing solutions available where extremely slow and did not give that best English blue colour I liked. And I do mean slow because the formula I used up till the Mercury is bad bad bad for you publicity, I used a gun trade rapid rust blue formula turning the barrels from the white to blue and finished in less than an hour. I do still have a quart of the solution enough to blue about a hundred barrel sets, though it is so toxic I have arranged for a Toxic chemical disposal company to dispose of it for me because of the quantity.


[Linked Image from i.imgur.com]

I would not give out how to use this formula because of its high Toxicity though you can still read the label, hard to consider now it was the go to express rust bluing agent for well over a hundred years, people just did not realize how toxic mercuric Chloride is. This bottle was made up by a local Pharmacist in the 1970's. So this is just for historical information only definitely not to be tried.

The only lessons in my life I truly did learn from where the ones I paid for!