affects of heating

[BrokenBiker]

if i heat a stainless steel tube until it becomes a nice blue/purple colour, will it affect its corrosion resistance at all?

ive done it with titanium before but not on stainless

 

[GrahamGKD]

I'm no metallurgist but I think you would have to heat it more than that to affect its properties. After all, you have to get it hotter than that to weld it and you can weld without messing up the corrosion resistance?

 

[Paul99]

I'm no metallurgist but I think you would have to heat it more than that to affect its properties. After all, you have to get it hotter than that to weld it and you can weld without messing up the corrosion resistance?

No strictly on topic but related perhaps...

Monday saw us replacing a burst boiler in a 30+ yr old Rayburn Royale - not the standard boiler but a stage one upgrade needed to run radiators too. Anyway after a bit of searching turns out a local engineers / fabricators make them from scratch in 316l stainless in fact a large part of his fabrication work is now making stainless boilers. Upon collection he warned about stainless not being indestructible and aside from being vulnerable to chloride salts and sulphuric acid (forming from damp and poor quality coal) he also said that stainless will also readily form hairline cracks if they are run too hot and water allowed to boil inside them. He suggested it was steam that would do the damage as opposed to dry heat. Now he maybe using the above as a means of wriggling out of future warrantee claims though I don't think this to be the case TBH so he may well be correct.

 

[Lawnmowerboy]

No. All you're doing is thickening the layer of chromium oxide on the surface. Should be fine

 

[BrokenBiker]

cheers guys, its only for a rifle silencer and wont be getting that hot, just enough to get a nice deep blue/purple colour to it

 

[hareng]

Let us know how you got on, I never had much success colouring various stainless grades or chrome, brown at best.

 

[Lawnmowerboy]

If you get it too hot the grain structure changes and more chromium oxide appears on the outside of the grain which is what makes it dull an grey when you get it too hot.

 

[TechnicAl]

http://www.bssa.org.uk/topics.php?article=140

 

[clueless77]

Why don't you just use that camo tape that can be re-used. It's like the material they use for bandages.

 

[BrokenBiker]

Why don't you just use that camo tape that can be re-used. It's like the material they use for bandages.

I hate the stuff, used it on one of my air rifles and it started raining while I was out, when I got back home I tried removing the 'non stick' camo bandage and it left loads of horrible and difficult to remove crap behind.

I ended up having to use petrol to get it off, and that damaged the blueing so I had to re-blue the barrel.

plus I don't want it camo'd, this is for a pcp target rifle, but the range I frequent has a noise limit as imposed due to being fairly close to a housing estate so it requested that all pcp rifles are moderated.