Here's an article I did for
Rifle Loony News on Cerakoting, with the help of prairie goat and Charlie Sisk, partly because I'd had good results, and other people hadn't:
Among the recent “high-tech” products used on firearms is the ceramic-based Cerakote, originally developed for coating various portions of internal combustion engines, to prevent erosion/corrosion and reduce heat. Cerakote.com, the company’s automotive website, states it “can withstand temperatures up to 1,800˚…withstand thermal cycling as well as thermal shock…simply unmatched in corrosion and chemical resistance.”
Soon after Cerakote appeared some people started using it on other stuff, including firearms, partly because it’s available in a wide variety of colors. The first rifle I had Cerakoted was a custom 7x57 Mauser put together by what was then Serengeti Rifles, and is now named Kilimanjaro Rifles.
Their primary product back then was laminated stocks that didn’t “look” laminated, because unlike typical laminates, they were made out of fancy walnut blanks. Rather than several layers of contrasting dark-and-pale wood, a single thin slice was sawn from the middle of the blank—which was then reversed 180 degrees, and glued between the thick, exterior halves of the blank.
This resulted in a stock which looked like it had been made of a conventional, one-piece blank. In fact, often the thin interior slice had to be pointed out to people before they’d believe the stock was laminated. When finished with modern spar varnish, Serengeti stocks were also very weatherproof.
My rifle was built on a Montana Rifles “short” controlled-feed action, the perfect length for the 7x57. The Serengeti also asked if I’d like the steel Cerakoted, and explained what the stuff was—including that it could be just about any color, including one closely resembling matte blueing. I said sure, and the result was a “classic” hunting rifle that resisted severe weather, and the inevitable bumps and scrapes of hard hunting.
The first animal taken with the 7x57 was a bull moose, on a hunt in Alberta booked b long-time friends at Ameri-Cana Expeditions, Pat Frederick and his sons Nick and Dan. That was the start of a considerable list of big game taken with the 7x57, including a dozen during two long hunts in South Africa in 2007 and 2008, where during seven weeks the rifle handily took animals up to wildebeest and kudu in body size. The rifle also returned to Ameri-Cana’s lodge in 2009 for a trophy mule deer hunt on the high plains south of the lodge, where I had to crawl quite a ways to get within 300 yards of an old, 400-pound 3x3.
During all this the rifle took some abuse, especially in the mountains of South Africa’s Eastern Cape Province, where I fell on part of a steep “trail” consisting mostly of tennis-ball sized rocks, landing on top of the rifle. This bent the front end of the scope slightly, requiring quite a few clicks to sight-in again, and the walnut stock also acquired some dents, especially the tip of the forend. However, I’d considered the forend a little too long for the 21-inch barrel anyway, so shortened, rasped, sanded and refinished it. But the Cerakoting only suffered a few pinhole-sized dings on the bottom of the trigger guard, so small they couldn’t be seen from a couple feet away.
In 2008 I had a CZ 550 9.3x62 restocked and Cerakoted by Serengeti, which accompanied the 7x57 to South Africa on the second safari. Three years later the CZ also went on an 18-day safari in Tanzania, which extended into the beginning of the rainy season.
One of the two PHs I hunted with on that trip was a severe know-it-all, who pointed at the 9.3x62’s barrel at the end of a day that had including a morning downpour before a hot, sunny afternoon. The damp barrel had picked up a coating of red African dust, which the PH claimed was rust. I said no, it was just dust—whereupon he started to argue with me. I didn’t argue back, instead pouring the contents of a water bottle over the barrel—whereupon the “rust” disappeared.
I eventually had the barreled actions of several other custom and semi-custom hunting rifles Cerakoted blue-black, and also purchased a synthetic-stocked Weatherby Vanguard Cerakoted at the factory in a brown which Cerakote calls “Dark Earth.” The rifles have been hunted in Montana weather from hot and dry to wet snow to sub-zero temperatures, and in other places on Planet Earth from coastal Alaska to the Kalahari Desert. They’ve rubbed against pack-frames, bounced around in pickup racks and open boats, and encountered local geology from the Eastern Cape to the Missouri Breaks. At least 99.9% of the Cerakoting is still there.
Toward the end of this binge I started reading reports on
www.24hourcampfire.com about how Cerakote didn’t hold up very well. Some even claimed it wasn’t any tougher than Krylon spray-paint. This seemed odd, so I tracked some of the incidents down, first by phoning my rifle-loony friend Billy Stuver—who may have made the Krylon comment.
We’d met in 2010 after he and his father John invited us to hunt on their ranch in southeastern Montana—where they’ve outfitted for decades, and Billy started guiding as a teenager. Billy uses his guns hard, so I asked him for details about his Cerakoted guns, and it turned out there were four.
The first was a synthetic-stocked Remington 700 made by a gunsmith who’s pretty well-known in the business. The Cerakoting scratched easily, especially off the barrel. The second was a pre-’64 Model 70, Cerakoted by another company, and that finish rubbed off easily.
The third was a Glock handgun, one of a special run from Lipsey’s, the well-known firearms distributor, the Cerakoting applied at the factory. This proved tougher, but the “corners” wore thin after Billy holster-carried it considerably. The fourth was a used AR-15, Cerakoted by yet another gunsmithing company: Its finish held up best of all, with some wear mostly on the charging handle.
Other Campfire reports included a rifle that went after brown bear on Kodiak Island, and by the end of the 2-week hunt a backpack’s synthetic-fiber bag had worn the finish completely off the bolt-handle.
This all seemed pretty curious to me, so I contacted Charlie Sisk (
www.siskriflesmfg.com), the well-known custom gunsmith who’s built and rebarreled several rifles for me. One had been a J.C. Higgins, a rifle they introduced in the 1950s and 60s based on FN Mauser commercial actions. I’d acquired one in .270 Winchester for a pretty low price in the early 1990s, and replaced the very plain walnut stock with one made from a chunk of semi-fancy California English walnut I’d finished and checkered myself.
The bore had been somewhat worn when I purchased the rifle, and eventually the accuracy started to go, so in 2007 I had Charlie rebarrel it to 6.5x55 with a 1-8 twist Lilja barrel. When it came back the barreled action had, once again, been Cerakoted blue-black—which like that on my other rifles has held up very well.
So I called Charlie and asked who did the Cerakoting--and it turned out he had. He’s been using the stuff since the 1990s, partly because he’d established his first gunsmithing shop in Houston: If gunsmithing slowed down (as it sometimes does for young gunsmiths) plenty of machining work was available in the area.
In Houston he met a guy named Chris Fish, the guy who’d invented Cerakote for engines, especially the tops of cylinders. Fish eventually developed similar “nano-ceramic” coatings for The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), including one used on the last Space Shuttle flight in 2011.
Aided by advice from Fish, Charlie started Cerakoting rifles, and when I asked why it sometimes held up very well, and sometimes didn’t, we ended up talking for close to an hour. Here are the most important points he made:
The Cerakote itself is less important than the prep, and in fact 90% of successfully applying Cerakote is surface preparation of the metal, which needs to be sand-blasted or bead-blasted— which some appliers apparently don’t do.
After that the metal needs to be chemically clean: First, heat it to 250 degrees, then use methyl ethyl ketone (MEK)—twice. After that clean it with denatured alcohol—and then heat the metal again. (Remington 700 BDL guards may have to be heated/cleaned several times with MEK.)
The surface-blasting creates tiny irregularities in the surface, giving Cerakote something to “bite onto,” which doesn’t occur with a smooth surface. In fact, as an experiment Charlie once sprayed and baked Cerakote into the hand-lapped bore of a Lilja barrel that had been through the MEK/alcohol/heating process. The Cerakoting came out with one cotton patch.
The coating also “doesn’t apply worth a s--t under 70 degrees”—because it cools off while flying from the spray-gun to the metal’s surface, resulting in splattered drops instead of an even coating. Changing colors involves using different concentrates, and Cerakote paint in a jug can “stratify” considerably, the coloring ending up in different densities throughout the jug. Sisk puts steel nuts (as in nuts for bolts) inside the jug, and shakes it frequently so the nuts knock the coloring off the sides of the container. (He also said “you can smell when the mixture goes bad, because it turns rancid.”)
Charlie emphasized that “you CANNOT leave out a single step.” And even after applying Cerakote for decades, “It occasionally doesn’t work. I have screwed it up several ways to Sunday.”
Charlie uses his pocketknife to test if the Cerakote scrapes off after applying. If does “then you have to start all over.” (It’s apparent that some appliers don’t perform this sort of test.)
But if Cerakoting is done right “even if you sand it down to bare steel, there’s still Cerakote in the pores.”
I tested this by sanding away a small area of the Cerakote on the bottom of the CZ 9.3x62’s chrome-moly barrel just in front of the action, then mixing some salt with saliva on my finger-tip and smearing it on the “bare” steel. It did NOT rust—or “take” cold blueing, which is a controlled oxidation of ferrous metals similar to rust.
(By the way, typical sandpaper wouldn’t dent the Cerakote. Instead I had to use emery paper, where the “sand” is aluminum oxide, which in its natural state is called corundum. This is just down the Mohs mineral-hardness scale from diamond—and in paste form is used for grinding glass lenses.)
One of the problems when applying Cerakote to well-used guns is that oil and other contaminants get into small spaces like the barrel threads. The entire process takes a minimum of 5-6 hours for a typical bolt-action rifle—which is why Charlie only applies Cerakote to rifles he builds. Otherwise he has to take them completely apart, which eats up so much time most customers won’t pay enough to make the job worthwhile. He says this isn’t a problem at factories such as Weatherby’s, and the many other gun companies now offering Cerakoting.
And that is why so many Cerakote jobs don’t hold up. It’s not a fault in the coating, but the application. Which is why the Cerakote company holds classes in application—which many people who “offer” Cerakoting apparently don’t bother to attend.
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