Now, on to the Ethnographic bit! As you may be aware (dear reader) we have in our museum a jezail, with what looks like a watered barrel. "Aha", says I - "a prime candidate for de-rusting. It's a melancholy thought, that no-one shall again see the beautiful metalwork hidden beneath the mottled ugliness of rust, bearing witness to (inadvertent) neglect stretching over years." But wait - how will this stuff affect the very steel I seek to preserve, the wonderfully patterned wootz (or Damascus, or whatever it is - I'm still not wholly clear on this point)? Full of my increasingly typical circumspection, I rang up the chaps at Picreator and was told that it should be fine - Renaissance Metal De-Corroder shouldn't affect sound steel unless you leave said steel in the fluid for about a month or two, at which point you're just asking for trouble. Deciding that this would do, I filled a mug with the solution, rested the (clamped-up) barrel's breech end therein, and went home, fretting. I had already treated the hammer, trigger, trigger spindle and two of the barrel bands, with good results - but I still worried about that pattern.
The end result of this has been... interesting. What's undeniable is that the solution has removed a whole bunch of corrosion. It's not just removed it - it's devoured it. Sections of metal that haven't seen the light of day for decades are once more staring happily at me. Huzzah! But all the same, I'm a tad concerned. As you can see in the photographs, there is a clear boundary layer between the treated and untreated areas of steel. Treated steel seems to lose at least some of its lustre; it becomes very, very clean, but doesn't seem to shine as it once did. In addition, the area around the breech plug now has patches of orange colour, which I assume to be copper. This I find mystifying and more than a little worrying. I'm additionally not sure whether the solution has affected the watering, simply because - surprise, surprise - it was buried under rust heretofore.
Included are pictures. Note difference in colour and patina between the hammer and its lock; the clearly defined layers between different sections; and the strange deposits towards the very back of the barrel. Any ideas as to what they are, what the effect of this stuff on the watering might be, and what's making the steel so grey and lifeless (if very, very clean)?
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