So I just wanted to depict my final update:
I decided to keep the original thumbstud post heat treat which has a dirty bronze color and do an acid stone wash finish. The thumbstud shrank a little from the heat treating (I kept it in) so I just used some JB metal weld glue. Its solid as a rock now.
I did decide to refinish the blade only because the finish after the heat treat was funny in that it showed finger prints very easily. This is a worker for me so that had to be changed so I did an acid stone wash on it. For the acid wash I soaked it in Ferric Acid for about 12 mins. I wanted a light to medium acid wash. I think it came out pretty close to what I wanted. The only error I made was a drip on the tip that I didn't wipe off fast enough and left it a bit darker then the rest of the blade. I was using fresh acid so it works very quickly!
For the stone washing I used ceramic media of the triangular variety from habor freight. I used about half of the full sized and half of some smaller sized media I made. For this I just took the larger media and crushed it up with a hammer then threw it in the stone tumber for an hour to round out all the edges. Then I put both the small and larger sized media in the
rotational tumbler with some dish soap and a little of filtz metal polish.
Just to note as I previously commented the heat treat did "roughen" up the smoothness just a bit. So to combat this I polished just the surface that would be in contact with the washers up to 0.125 microns with stropping compound...ie a mirror polish. To protect this through the acid bath and stone washing I used clear coat nail polish and tape. First I put a minium of 3-4 layers of clear coat nail polish on the circular area I brought up to a mirror polish then cut out about 10 layers of masking tape and cut that into a circular shape and put it over the area I applied the clear nail polish. This worked like a charm through the acid bath and stone wash it was fully protected and cleaned up very easily! Yep it was still mirror polished through it all! This greatly improved the smoothness. It actually made it more smooth before I started this adventure. Its important to note that I mirror polished the washers on the blade side only. Then fine tuned them just like they do at the CRK factory. Expected instead of using sand paper I used stropping compound. In the end the washers came up right flat and even with the bushing when inserted into the blade and adjusted to smoothness. Not exactly a beginner project but if you are meticulous, have no fear.
Enough talking here are the pictures:
Anyway I am reasonably happy with how the finish turned out. Now I just need to put a nasty edge on the blade and see how it holds up?
I guess my only other question for other readers is if anyone has ever tried heat treating a double thumbstud blade to see what would happen if you didn't take out the studs before sending it out?!
. taped it up real good, wrapped it in a towel, taped that up real good, then threw it in the dryer with a couple other loose towels (to keep the noise down) for 20 minutes on a no heat cycle. I can take a pic of the size of the pebbles and Tupperware container I used if you want.
