Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Color case hardening in my BBQ pit?

Is this likely to work? I know the temperature needs to be around 1400 degrees but I think a mix of Oak, Mesquite and Juniper can get there. It's enough to melt glass or aluminum so has to be close. Another question for maximum color can I use raw horn and leather or should it be the charcoal versions?

Oak, mesquite, and juniper are all mighty good at producing heat, but not in the league of charcoal. An old professor in college said there was no Iron Age... people figured out how to make charcoal and that allowed the metals to flow...

Make your own charcoal from your woods and see how hot it gets...

Mesquite and Oak charcoal is readily available. I think with a blower I can get the needed heat. If not friends have Black Smith forge setups.

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.

If you are talking about Texas juniper/ cedar that stuff has a lot of creasote and not a lot of heat when burned. I'd stick with oak, and try to get a monster bed of coals and some sort of blower in there.

Bear in mind that the only steel suitable for conventional case-hardening is low carbon steel such as found in antique shotguns, pistols, lever action rifles, etc.( basically black -powder era guns). Modern through hardening steel alloys like 4140 which is near universal today is not suitable for case-hardening. I know Turnbull appears to do it on modern guns, but it really isn't, it just looks like it. The coloring is simply a by-product of quenching the hot steel and is simply the temper colors that you can see when you heat polished metal. The color is produced by a microscopic layer of iron oxide of varying thickness ( same principle as oil on water) and is not durable. Contrary to internet rumor, sunlight will not fade it, but skin acids will.

RAN

Thanks for the information. I will give it a try as at least I'll get a BBQ brisket out of the deal. Will bone powder work or doe's it have to be bone charcoal? I thought it would carbonize during the process. If this doesn't work I will try a clay kiln or send it to Turnbull. Not sure what type of steel it is a skeleton butt plate from an unknown maker and a Dakota grip cap. I know I can do the tempering colors and then quench in partial dips to get bands of color but no where near as good as Turnbull.