Polishing a barrel

[billholmes]

Afternoon. I am preparing to order an in-the-white Early English Trade Run or Tulle in the next day or two from Sitting Fox. I am a newbie at finishing so I would like some advice at making a polished bright barrel and lock. What kind of material/tools are needed? Difficult or not? I would like some advice from the pros out there. I am wondering if its worth the trouble to do myself and if i should just buy a finished gun. Also, if anyone out there has a .20 ga flintlock for sale, let me know, maybe i will take it off your hands instead. Any thoughts on Sitting Fox guns? I have heard they are extremely well made but I have never seen one personally.
Thanks

 

[BrownBear]

The only polishing to bright I do is on modern arms for bluing after I have turned the barrels. For that I use a polishing wheel and jewelers rouge. That would work for the round portion of the barrel, but I'd stay clear of the octagonal section. I bet it would round your flats before you got a high degree of polish. On octagonal barrels you can get a pretty high degree of polish by wrapping emmory around a good sized mill bastard and "draw filing," but I'm not sure if that's as high a polish as you want.

You can get both the wheel and the rouge from Brownells.

 

[Elnathan]

For what polishing I have done I have just used sandpaper, starting with 100 grit or so and working my way down to 320 wet-or-dry. Emery cloth has proven to be much more expensive than paper without giving any real advantage, in my experience, though it may just be lousy emery cloth. Lots of other people use it, so you might want to give it a try. Whatever you use, wrap it around files or pieces of hard wood, and change angles every time you change grits so that you can see whether you have successfully polished out the scratches from the previous grit. DO NOT move on to the next grit until ALL the previous marks are gone. Use sharp paper or cloth, too. It doesn't seem to be a particularly hard job, unless perhaps you are aiming for a mirror-polish, but it is undeniably tedious and takes a great deal of time.

There are other ways of doing it, but that is how I have done things so far.

 

[mazo kid]

You say "polished bright" and I have never done that. You could do as the others have suggested for the round part of the barrel, then "practice" on the lower 3 flats of the octagon section (they don't show) to get the finish you desire. I would think you could file and/or sand those flats to get rid of tool marks, then sand with progressively finer grits wrapped around a hardwood block and finish up with fine Emery cloth. I have gotten a near mirror finish on small parts that way.