Usage
Bluing is most commonly used by gun manufacturers, gunsmiths and gun owners to improve the cosmetic appearance of and provide a measure of corrosion resistance to their firearms. It was also used by machinists, who protected and beautified tools made for their own use. Bluing also helps to maintain the metal finish by resisting tangential scratching, and also helps to reduce glare to the eyes of the shooter when looking down the barrel of the gun. All blued parts still need to be properly oiled to prevent rust. Bluing, being a chemical conversion coating, is not as robust against wear and corrosion resistance as plated coatings, and is typically no thicker than 2.5 micrometres (0.0001 inches). For this reason, it is considered not to add any appreciable thickness to precisely-machined gun parts.
New guns are typically available in blued finish options offered as the least-expensive finish, and this finish is also the least effective at providing rust resistance, relative to other finishes such as Parkerizing or hard chrome plating or nitriding processes like Tenifer.
Bluing is also used for providing coloring for steel parts of fine clocks and other fine metalwork.
Bluing is often a hobbyist endeavor, and there are many methods of bluing, and continuing debates about the relative efficacy of each method.
Historically, razor blades were often blued steel. A non-linear resistance property of the blued steel of razor blades, foreshadowing the same property that would later be discovered in semiconductor diode junctions, along with the ready availability of blued steel razor blades, led to the use of razor blades as a detector in the crystal set AM radios which were often built by soldiers during World War II.
Read more about this topic: Bluing (steel)
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