not the 1911 i ever dreamed id wind up with, i love the classic ww2 era 1911, i think the finish on them is just beautiful. so when i bought the metal body for mine and needed to strip the paint off it i figured, great! now i can get some blueing polish and do that, itll look so beautiful!!
but alas i found out the blueing finish is for steel, so i bought some aluminum blackening for it, tried that (that was an ordeal). i applied it with no reasult except the edges, i quickly realised that it wasnt going to stain oxadized aluminum so i need to buff it all off. i tried that and the finish was... well it left alot to be desired and it wasn not very durable, scratched easy and it was a satin looking.... not nice anywho.
i knew i didnt want to paint it as i wanted a durable scratch resistant finish, so polishing it was my next option and i did NOT want to do that. im not against bling guns, they look very nice, but i dont see their use on the field. so i buffed the affected portion off and polished it, and found that finish was just awful. since i had buffed it with a steel wire wheel, it had scored the surface up and when polished it looked like a cheap plastic dollar stor cap gun. the surface looked like a chrome orange peel and horrible. so i was pretty discouraged at this point and didnt want to leave it at the dull grey aluminum look as it seemed unfinished to me, thankfully my previous attempts were done on a small portion for testing purposes. so i was scuffing up the surface to remove the chrome orange peel look and realized that if i buffed it enough it smothed out the surface to make a mirror finish (yah, duh, i dunno why this didnt remember this before), and if i polished it after that, what would happen? eureka! lol.
again, not egsactly what i wanted but it does look good and its kinda special as i put in the manuel time to do this. it took me (and im not egsadurating) 7 full hours to polish this by hand w/ 400 grit sandpaper to get the surface even, then apply the polish to shine it up. my next step is to get nirbee to make some custom wood grips for it if he ever gets back to me.
