Browning has been finishing Citori receivers with a shiny coin finish they call Silver Nitride. Does anyone know what this finish really is? (Ain't Silver Nitride, which is highly unstable)

I ask because I would like to chemically strip it and blue the receiver. *hoping it's nickel and can be easily stripped*

Thanks in advance.

I'm betting on nickel too.

113 Views and one supporting guess. OK, fair enough...Browning won't say either: "it's Proprietary".

I'll be trying Nickel Stripper and will post the results.

There are a lot of nitride coatings out there, and some of them are silver colored.

There is titanium nitride, titanium carbonitride, chromium nitride, titanium aluminum nitride, zirconium nitride, zirconium carbonitride, and some others. Some of these are yellow, some gray, some blue-gray. Some can be co-deposited with other metals to improve their appearance or corrosion resistance.

I'm a chemist, but I don't "know" this stuff. I just typed ("titanium nitride" silver) or ("zirconium nitride" silver) or (titanium zirconium nitride color hardness) in a yahoo! search. It turns up lots of companies that coat tools and jewelery and other articles with various nitrides. If you just type in ("silver nitride"), you get a lot of results warning you about blowing things up with really unstable silver nitride.

A common technique of applying these coatings is to do so over an electroless nickel base coat. Your nickel stripper might work by eating away the nickel base coat and allowing the nitride coating to flake off.

Since most of these nitride coatings will behave chemically like titanium nitride, whatever strips off titanium nitride will probably strip your shotgun too. I'd practice on cheap drill bits and see what takes the titanium nitride off of those.

H. C.

Henry,
Thanks! We'll see in a (insert estimated time frame here) if Nickel Stripper works.

If it's TiN, the stripper is 35% H202, which is (from one chemist to another) a fairly serious oxidizer at that concentration. Pool supply places sell it by the quart and it'll be the next evil potion that I dip a poor abused trigger guard into for testing.

One step at a time.

Nitriding of steel has been around for a long time .Things like Glock pistols are gas carbonitrided with additional processes to make it very corrosion resistant. It's hard to tell these days !!

35% H2O2, that'll strip the hide offen your fingers and if you get a little bit up under your fingernails you will discover a new meaning for the word pain
Not a Chemest just a knuckle dragging maintenance guy, from one of the larger tool coating companies, that works with that stuff everyday.

Tailgunner,
In your experience is the H2O2 the right stuff to strip TiN?

And a follow up; If it is the right stripper, what should I expect to happen once the coating is gone and the H2O2 is in contact with the steel substrate?

Thanks in advance!

35% H202 with a little Na4EDTA (CAS# 64-02-8)added is what we use. Room temp H2O2 will work will work, but is slower. For fastest results heat to 120F but not over 125F make sure you have a decent amount of cooling available (it will go into a thermal runaway).
Once the reacation stops there will be a very thin layer of TiO2 that can be removed with mild abrasive (light glass bead or alumna-oxide blast, scotchbrite etc). We havent obsereved any degradation of polished steel surfaces, however we try to remove the material as soon as possable after stripping is complete (within a couple of hours).