I just pulled them out of the oven and oiled them and they looked so cute I had to post something. I'm puting a suspension liner into a Valsgrad-6 helm kit. The helm was heat blued and then oiled while still warm for the oil to soak into the open pores. Note this was NOT about oil 'blackening' but just 'seasoning' the steel after bringing it to full purple at 530.
Now I couldn't put in the leather first and bring it to this temperature and if I riveted in the suspension liner with regular rivets there would be 8 bright/rusty rivets surrounded by dozens of purpleis-blue rivets so I needed a way to polish them.
Solution: Flap wheel on the grinder with 120 grit. buffer with expanding wheel of trizac 300 one one end and firm buffing wheel with green cutting compound on the other. Leave both machines running and chuck the rivet head into a cordless hand drill. Move from station to station at maybe 15 seconds/piece with the drill spinning against or accross the direction of the bench tool. Yeah I skipped a few polishing levels so there are probably finely polished scratches rather then a true mirror but BFD, they are just the rivets... and they look sweet in dark purple and a light oil.
I can't do the final riviting until tomorrow because my daughter is asleep but I'll probably have pictures up next week.
I bet they do look nice.
I do the same thing, chuck them up in a drill and spin them against my flap wheel.
On polishing them I just hold them with the vice grips against the buff wheel.
But to blue them I place them on a fire brick and hit em with a small propane torch.
Once I wanted big looking rivets on a spangen.
I used 1/4" carriage bolts, however the tops had letters and numbers raised on them.
The drill trick and my belt sander took care of that.
