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Bending sand cast brass?

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jrmflintlock

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I ordered a sand cast brass trigger guard and was wondering if I needed to aneal it before I try and bend it a bit. I have never worked with brass only steel on my rifles. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Depends on how much you need to bend. They all require a little bit of bending and most can be tweaked to fit, but if you need a large adjustment it is probably better to anneal. They will break if you try to use too much force.
 
I broke one when I assumed that since it came out of the mold it was probably as soft as it would get. Wrong! :cursing:

It was a pistol triggerguard and a poorly made one at that. It broke. I was able to repair it but probably would have had no problem if I'd have annealed it.

The other thing is that not all "brass" is the same. Some just by it's alloy is softer than others.
 
Since I have never worked with brass, any suggestions on how to aniel it?

Do I just heat it up till it starts changing color and then let it cool? Any help would be appreciated! Thanks guys!!!
 
To anneal brass, heat it until it just begins to glow in low light, and quench it in water. Sand cast yellow brass is generally dead soft and is easily bent in your hands. A good casting can be bent, beaten, and pounded quite a bit before needing annealing. Some castings, however, are just bound to break, no matter what. Not properly cast, poured too fast/too cool/whatever. If the casting breaks with minimal bending, it's the casting's fault. It can be soldered together, but it may well end up breaking elsewhere. I've run across more and more like this lately.
 
All of the sand cast brass furniture I've bought is brass and the as cast brass is annealed the way it comes to you.

If you buy an investment casting which is usually pretty fancy and looks like it wouldn't need much to finish it you may find that it is a bronze casting.

Bronze material is considerably more brittle than brass and trying to bend it, even with annealing done will often crack or break it.

As a test for the curious, brass is easily filed with a good file. You can feel the file teeth bite into it as it removes the material.

Bronze is difficult to file. The file will seem to skid across the material rather than biting into it.

Also be aware, even with annealed brass, repeated bending will work harden it resulting in a brittle material.
If multiple bending is needed, anneal it between each attempt to bend it.
 
I have cast hundreds of gun part with both Brass and Bronze. I have used both sand casting and precision investment casting. The process has nothing to do with the ductility of the casting in my opinion. Whether a brass part is wax cast or sand cast it will have the same properties as far as the ductility goes. Both castings are annealed when they come out of the sand or investment.
Sometimes the metal is changed by the melting process or the atmosphere in the furnace. Too much oxygen in the fire will cause zinc to burn out of the brass or cause other problems. Too high of a pouring temp can cause problems as well as other things. The basic difference between the investment process and the sand process is the quality of the products surface. if both processes are conducted correctly. Sand casting is cheaper that is why so many like it. There are two different types of investment casting. The shell process and the investment process. As with other subjects about 1/2 of the people giving advice on the subject have never dome it.
Brass is what blacksmiths call hot short. That means it cannot be bent or worked when hot. Hot brass is extremely brittle. To anneal it brass only needs to be heated to about 1350 ° F. and quenched. It will anneal if not quenched but will be softer if it is quenched. Brass can be heat treated but that is a different subject.
 
While I totally agree that the casting process has nothing to do with the type of material that can be cast or its "as cast" ductility,my reason for saying what I did in my last post is, the castings I have bought from the various muzzleloading parts suppliers were as I described.

The sand castings from these suppliers were cast in brass.
The investment castings sold by these suppliers were cast with bronze.

The brass castings bent easily. The bronze castings usually broke if I attempted to bend them.

My posting was intended to be more of a warning to new builders than a comment on the casting process.
 
Chambers' investment castings are made from brass and so are Goehrings. They bend easily w/ Goehrings being the softer and easier to bend.

Sand castings would bend easier if a lot of the brass were removed.....some are pretty thick. Have bent all the brass castings w/o heat.

Also, the incorrect casting setup can produce parts that contain voids at intersections and also at changes of thicknesses and shapes.

Chambers Isaac Haines TG has some voids and I've broken 2 at the same place and finally went to a different style which bent w/o a problem.

Don't know if many TGs and Bplates today are made from bronze seeing the color doesn't match yellow brass. The mismatched color of the bronze Bplate in the pic below wouldn't be quite so obvious if the Bplate were polished every so often, but there would still be a difference....Fred

 
Zonie.
My post was not referring to anything you said. Some of the others on this forum and others seem to think that sand casting makes more ductile castings.
The bronze that some casters are using is silicone bronze. It is extremely brittle and cannot be annealed by any means I have found. I cast some butt plate out of it and one of them broke when dropped on the foor.
 
Did you buy that TG rom Goehring? Looks like one of his castings....Fred
 
While on the subject of brass furniture I'll mention a few things about trigger guard castings I've bought.

Almost all of them are WAY too thick.

There's a couple of reasons for this.

First, metal shrinks as it cools so if the casting pattern exactly duplicates an existing part and is used to make the cavity for the casting, the casting will be undersize and too thin.

The surfaces of a sand casting all need to be cleaned up to remove all traces of the rough sand that formed the cavity. To make allowances for this, the casting is made a lot thicker than the original.

The areas of the casting that form the bow are very thin on the original trigger guards.
If the new castings were made that thin, the molten metal would solidify so rapidly that it would block off the molten metal that should be filling the area downstream.

The moral of this is, the bow areas of as cast trigger guards is much thicker than it should be.

When I first started building longrifles I was happy when I got all of the rough cast surface on the castings removed.
I then sanded and polished them and proclaimed them "done". :)

The problem is, for some reason, they never seemed to look like the slim, lithe trigger guards from the past. They looked rather "chunky" or fat.

I've corrected this error on my newer builds but it was not as easy as saying, "Oh, just remove exactly .046 of material from each surface."
In fact, there is no good number that can be used because different areas of the castings have different amounts of material added to the surfaces.

The best advice I can give to new builders is, try to find good photos of the old original guns.

Pay particular attention to how thin the trigger guard bows look. Use multiple views if they are available.

When thinned down to the thicknesses of the originals, you'll be amazed at how slender and lithe and beautiful a trigger guard can actually be. :thumbsup:
 
Reeves Goehring's TG castings are investment cast using the original TGs from original guns as the pattern.

The first time I rec'd a Goehring TG I was hesitant to use it because it looked so fragile. I even posted questions asre how thin it was.

My concerns were unfounded because once the TG was attached to the stock, it was quite sturdy.

Goehring's TGs are slightly smaller and thinner than the originals because of shrinkage from hot metal to cold. But, they do work well and require a minimum of brass removal. On my Bucks County LRs, it's the only TG I now use. The yellow brass bends more easily than any other TG I've used....Fred

 
jrmflintlock said:
This is the piece in question for me. it seemed to file pretty easy.



This is not a Goehring triggerguard. It is a sand cast guard commonly available from many vendors. I forget the name of the company that actually casts them...

My opinions on the historicity of this particular triggerguard I won't offer here... :grin:
 
That TG is kinda refined and smooth compared to the sand castings I'm familiar with. It doesn't have a whole lot of brass that must be removed and the detail is far above that found w/ the usual sand cast TGs. All in all, it doesn't look like a sand casting....I might be wrong which wouldn't be a rare occurence......Fred
 
I took that photo after I had filed on it for about 2 hours.

It is still far from done. I still neet to polish it up some. That was just to get the casting marks off.

Thanks for all the input guys!!
 
I currently building a Chambers Pennsylvania Fowler. The stock has a pretty steep angle the TG must conform to. I tried bending it cold and it broke right at the base of the bow. I soldered it back together and it's close to the right angle but I'll have to bend it some more. I wasn't even ready to install the TG. I was just fooling around, looking at the parts and created some more work for myself! :doh:
 
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