Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have a relatively new Remington 700 SPS heavy barreled Varmint in 223. I have ditched the tuperware stock and restocked it in a nice piece of walnut with a blind magazine and a trigger guard fashioned from a scraped Mauser that is now nicely rust blued.

The Remington has a matt blue type finish. I am toying with the idea of taking it back to bare metal, polishing it up to 320 grit and then rust bluing.

Question and experiences please - is the barrel steel on newer Remingtons (mine has the X Mark Pro trigger) good enough to take a decent Rust blue. Or should I just leave it as is.

Good enough? It is 4140 chrome moly steel. It will rust. The matte finish on is is just sand blasted and blued.

We have had SPS's in the be polished and blued that turned out to be stainless and coated.
Under the coat they can be really rough.
For customers who still want a "blue" gun we polished out the machine marks and sent for Cerakote.

M

Now, if they are SS, of course; no rust blue.

Rust bluing a SPS would be about like putting a high polish blue on an M1.

The matt finish, sand blasted and blued as dpcd rightly points out, is done to provide surface that will hold oil and prevent rusting supposedly better than a highly polish surface will. Each to his own but why customise a cheap rifle that shoots as accurate as any other and is designed, with its matt finish and plastic stock, to take the hard knocks in all weathers. I free floated my 7mm-08 SPS tupperware stock, and I mean really free floated enough to allow an oily rag to be pulled along the underside of the barrel to prevent rusting after a hard wet or snowy hunt. My son collared it from me, now adorning a suppressor and bipod, and just loves it saying he just has to point and shoot and drop animals. Pulled off some good long shots on big bull Tahr on our trip into our Alps back in June with the Remington so it shoots. It's a tool not an adornment.

I've worked on too many guns from the 1920's and 30's that were rust blued and it was still wearing well, doing it's job. On the other hand I have handled many later Remington offerings that were rusted in the box new from the factory! Particularly the matte finish. A good rust blue sealed with a drying oil will hold up well beyond the user's lifetime. It is amazing how well a 700 looks if you radius all of the sharp edges

Bob
www.rustblue.com