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Marc
18th October 2013, 09:10 PM
When you finish your forged work of art, the last thing you want is for it to rust and deteriorate.
Yet you are not game to slap a coat of paint and make it look cheap.

There is hope. This is what I do, and I learned it from a couple of Italian blacksmith I worked for some 50 years ago.
Once you are done with whatever it is you have done, you have a choice of total black or black with some bits of rusty red showing.

You need a good quality paint in either black of red colour. For red I used to use the old anti rust that resembled the colour of rust rather well... but it was made with lead so no longr available.
Today I need to mix red-brown orange- to get to that rust tone.
You also need the essential ingredient that is Plumbago. Plumbago use to be the polish of choice for steam locomotives and pot belly stoves. Still in use as a parting agent for artisan that want to do some casting. It is graphite and lead not sure in what proportion. I don't know of a local source for this but you can buy from the UK no problems. Plumbago Powdered Graphite 5Kg, Artisan Foundry Shop (http://artisanfoundry.co.uk/store/product_info.php?products_id=136&osCsid=932b7bbb45af1524a27fd64a7709dd8e)

The procedure is rather simple. Paint your object with a rather light coat of paint so that you don't cover the details with the paint. As soon as it is tacky, and this is the bit that you need to experiment...if too fresh you get too much plumbago on if, too dry you don't get enough or it will come off ... so ...get a bit of plumbago in a tin the size of a shoe polish container (without the shoe polish that is) and with a rag pick up a good bit of powder and start rubbing in on the paint. The plumbago will stick to the paint and if you gave it black and cover it all, you will end with a metallic black. If you chose rust red, be carefull not to cover everything and let some edges of red show here and there, the effect is that the object is old and starting to rust. Yet it will never do so.
I have seen this done with green paint, heritage green that has some black in it, but I suppose that you can try any other, yellow, brown, blue, dark red ?

good hunting
Marc