Polished
Something that pretty belongs on an equally impressive gun — in this case, Colt’s bright stainless .38 Super. Polishing, too, is less about just the pretty than what it represents. In this case, skill. The Colt factory is the only place I know that has a sign hanging from the ceiling honoring its polishers.
This focus is not new: In 1855, the Dickens-run magazine Household Words talked about the polisher in Colt’s London plant submitting to regular eye injuries from “red-hot particles of emery” thrown off by the wheel rather than wear protective glasses, likely because it would have limited his ability to see his work. In 1912, the Ordnance Office promptly asked Colt to tone down the shine on its newly adopted 1911 pistol before it got somebody killed, to which Springfield Armory responded drily, “it is believed that a more dull finish can be provided.” As of 1936, even experienced polishers hired by Colt were required to go through a training school. That may sound a bit much if you haven’t tried it yourself, but like jewelry making, there’s a lot more to it than appearances suggest.
It takes a skilled craftsman 40 hours to fully hand polish a firearm, working through multiple grits of abrasive, from 400 to 600, 800, 1,000, 1,500, and in some cases to 3,000, carefully removing the scratches from each prior grit before moving to the next. You also have to keep the rounds round and the flats dead flat, without a wandering line where they meet, which is very difficult, even with the part stable on a bench. Now imagine freehanding it on a wheel since a manufacturer doesn’t have the time to rub on every pistol for a week. Traditionally, Colts were polished on a large wooden wheel covered in leather to which the abrasive was applied. The wheel was then trued and used by exactly one person. That’s been updated, but it requires no less skill to use a modern Baldor.
Knifemaker Bob Engnath called the buffing wheel a killing machine, and he wasn’t wrong. Gunsmiths love the Dremel because even its tiny wheel is so hard to use well that people frequently damage their guns and have to bring them in for expensive repairs. On a big wheel, a twist or roll in the wrong direction wrenches the part from your hand and launches it across the room, not to mention the various skid marks, divots and wavy lines a mistake leaves, even when the wheel doesn’t take it away from you. Voila, you’ve scrapped a thousand-dollar gun.
That’s why there’s a sign.
Read the full article here