The problem you will have is holding the heat at 1400-1500 degrees for the required two to four hours...if you can do that you can make it work. The charcoal you use to get the colors has to be animal bone charcoal. It can be "diluted" with wood charcoal, but the color wont be as strong as that done with all bone charcoal. I tried leather and a host of other charcoals just to try them and see what I got. Back when I was doing this a lot there was a lot of bad information floating around.
The real kick in the tail is that even if you manage to get all bone charcoal for four hours at 1500 degrees and quench it in distilled water with air bubbles going full blast the parts will be beautiful, but the finish is not very durable....it will wear right off easily by simply being handled. A coat of metal lacquer or clear epoxy will help but also dull it down. Also, the brighter you polish the metal the better looking the colors will be. The parts have to look like chrome before you color case harden them. Good luck...sometimes the parts will warp.
No matter how you do it or how good it looks, the rest of the world will look at it and say, "that don't look right" or "those colors are different"....again, good luck. If you seriously want to do color case hardening you need to make an electric furnace with cal-rods and a temp controller.
Last edited by msinc; 07/05/17.
