Winchester Rifle Project part 1

A lot of times you can salvage an old gun when you think it's beyond repair. As long as the gun hasn't been in a house fire, it's probably salvageable. Recently I had an old Winchester 94 come in that was pretty badly rusted. Bluing wasn't going to help because of how deep the rust pits were. Also, the bolt was rusted in the receiver. This looks like a custom job....

The first thing I did was scrap the old stock set. Then I sandblasted the rust off the action and polished it smooth.

I made a fixture to prevent the receiver from warping under high heat. Then I used a combination of bone and wood charcoal to color case harden the receiver.

This is the opposite side of the receiver.

The intricate swirl patterns are pretty random, but by layering the charcoal in different ways i can have a tiny bit of control over the case coloring.