LMF Browning Touch -Up

[Old Sarge]

This is probably covered in another topic in the past, but, My Green Mountain Barrel on a TC Hawken (old barrel) has a orange spot developing on the left side in front of rear sight. Probably fron handling while hunting. Can I touch up this area without re-doing the whole barrel or what? Thanks for the info in advance.

 

[Zonie]

You should be able to rebrown the area but before you do, try your best to rub off the orange material with a rough piece of cloth like bluejeans are made from.

If you can get the orange material rubbed off, lightly oil the area. It should return to the brown color of the area around it.
(Browning is just a hard rust. The orange or red stuff is soft rust).

If that doesn't do the job and you really need to rebrown the area it must be totally free of all oil, grease or wax.
A light sanding with some 220 or 320 grit paper to roughen up the surface and then applying some Laurel Mountain browning agent (or some other brand) and exposing it to warm, humid air should cause it to start rusting.

It may take several applications so rub off any loose, red rust that forms and apply another coating of the browning agent.

Although the new browning will look lighter than the surrounding area when it is first done, it will darken a great deal once some gun oil has been applied.

 

[Col. Batguano]

Right. But you might think about using a heavier oil, and maybe even dirty motor oil to get it closer to the chocolate brown of the rest of the barrel. this assumes you did a LMF cold browning rather than a hot brown. The cold browning tends to be a little more durable, as it's a deeper penetrating brown.

You can darken it even further by burning it with a torch, but this will blacken the whole area. This yields an even harder finish. I finished the barrel of my last build this way, and really like the look better than the chocolate brown of the previous one, which was just browned and oiled.

 

[Old Sarge]

I am going to try to re brown the one side. If that doesnt work then I will just do the whole barrel. Thanks for the info. A guy at work said just use a little birchwood casey's cold blue over the area. I dont know about that one. Any thoughts on that?

 

[Eric Krewson]

I have tried touch-up matching when I buggered up my browning job while changing front sights, it didn't go well. My browning job on this barrel was thin because I went to 400 grit sandpaper while preping the barrel for browning.

The other day a friend was showing me how he filed sights and scratched the browning to bare metal in near the rear sight on my squirrel rifle. On this gun I had stopped at 220 while sanding the barrel and the barrel browned thick and dark.

I cleaned the scratch with acetone and put a thin coat of LMF over the scratch. I used and artists brush and must have gone over it twice because it turned coppery. I left it overnight and repeated the same application every day with a little carding in between. My scratch disappeared after 4 days and the area blended well with the rest of the gun.

 

[MSK]

Eric: Did you have to put the gun in a moist environment for the LMF to work on that scratch or did you simply let it do its thing wherever?