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I am in the process of building myself a bigger Heat Treatment oven and am slowly sourcing the parts required. My design was always going to be a vertical type 6.5kW so I can heat treat items such springs and pins and also be able to colour case harden in-house. The design gives me a 200mm x 200mm x 400mm internal space so room enough to fit a Crucible for the parts to be coloured however this has set me thinking, is there any reason why parts such as receivers are usually shown as being coloured vertically as opposed to horizontaly.

Thoughts anyone?

run off of chemicals looks better lenght ways

greenshoots

Watching with interest, I've always fancied having my Marlin 1894 receiver colour case hardened.

greenshoots wrote:run off of chemicals looks better lenght ways

greenshoots

No chemicals involved, just a lot of hotness :)

I haven't done this for more than 40 years, but we used to place strips of leather on the part to be coloured and then pack the whole thing in a tin can full of charcoal. Results were usually spectacular, but not always. Note that the quench is important to bring out the colours.
Fred

Fred, was the leather used as an alternative to bone charcoal which seems to be impossible to source here in the UK.

No chemicals involved, just a lot of hotness

beg to differ items you use ie leather, bone,charcol will produce chemical reaction with the metal

greenshoots

I have used garden bone meal in the past.

what were the results like Adam?

Seemed to work well enough along with all the other sh!te we had in with it, temperature seemed to be the key for when being put into the quench