Hi everyone,
I do a number of wood and metal working projects (I'm a really green wood worker but I hope to build up my skill). Over the years I have deal with the rust issue due to working in a humid climate.
I have some older wood working hand tools that I would like to refinish. I've been doing some reading on various processes used to provide a protective coating. Specifically I was looking for a process that I could easily do in the home shop. I've been thinking about buying some cold blue and I was just about to until I started reading about some of the rust bluing processes. The only problem was that traditional rust bluing takes a long time.
I did some more reading and I recalled an experiment we did in high school chemistry involving a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and salt applied to steel wool. The hydrogen peroxide and salt rusted the steel wool so quickly that you could measure the temperature change. I then did some further searching and I found someone beat me to the idea of quickly rusting parts using hydrogen peroxide and salt: http://mypeculiarnature.blogspot.ca/...-in-black.html
I tried it out on some vise clamps I made (I didn't want to do it immediately on my set of older chisels in case it didn't work), it took only about an hour or so, and I'm very pleased with the results:
viseclamps-lowres1.jpg
I also made a video out of the process as a sort of instructions:
Here is the direct link if you wish to watch it via Youtube's site: https://youtu.be/xmv58Z3RZ9c
Hopefully this helps anyone with a future project they want to protect from rusting.