Ok, one by one
Here are the oils that I bought:
Furniture Clinic Teak Oil | Wood Oil Protects & Cleans Outdoor & Indoor Furniture, Boats, Shower Benches | Restore & Protect Wood, Prevent Drying & Other Damage | Natural Matte Finish | 17oz/500ml : Amazon.ca: Health & Personal Care
www.amazon.ca
Furniture Clinic Danish Oil | Wood Care for Interior & Exterior Furniture | Restore, Seal & Protect Oak, Pine, Teak & More | Non-Toxic Natural Satin Finish | Repels Water, Stains, Dirt | 8.5oz/250ml in Stain.
www.amazon.ca
KingsFleet - Boiled Linseed Oil | 16oz | Canadian Made | Premium Finishing Oil for Wood | Faster Drying | Restore, Protect, and Maintain! : Amazon.ca: Health & Personal Care
www.amazon.ca
On my previous models I was using tung oil from the russian store that I bought long ago.
I apply oils undiluted.
For the bithumen, it's the one that I bought from russian store long ago, before the war. I still have half the bottle. I dilute it with white spirit "as required" - just by looking at the resulting color and adjusting on the go
Now for the cannons...
I actually described my entire technology in my Royal William thread, so I didn't want to repeat the same thing twice. Especially since this time nothing went as expected and as it did last time. Nothing worked out normally. I don't know, maybe someone cursed my guns.
I'll start with the fact that there was something wrong with my white spirit. Before copper plating, I bathed the quarterdeck guns in it first. But instead of degreasing them, it created some kind of hydrophobic film on the guns, which made the copper to plate in multiple little spots. I struggled with them for a very long time, but eventually I copper plated them - and they acquired a very rich, beautiful, durable copper color - you can see this in the photo above - on the napkin on the right.
So I haven't bathed the other guns in this strange white spirit. Usually guns acquire a dark brown color a few seconds after they are taken out of the solution (on the napkin on the left), but these quarterdeck ones kept their beautiful color no matter what. I thought: what a beauty, they will probably blacken instantly and beautifully. No such luck. The blackening liquid reacted to them with extreme difficulty. It took me about 2 hours to blacken them - I took them out, washed, dried, sanded, blackened again, washed again, blackened again, and in the end I just left them in the solution for about an hour.
With other guns, which I no longer bathed in the white spirit, it was not easier. Nothing wanted to blacken or copper plate in a human way. With previous experience (Royal William) everything went without a single problem. But here ... blacken, take out, wash, blacken, sand, wash, blacken.... either the blackening was coming off, or the copper plating was coming off.... I completely lost count of how long I blackened them and for how many times, and what I did to them in between.
Eventually I covered them with oil, thinking they would become darker - but when the oil dried, they remained the same color as they were before, except that they were now covered with a film that no longer allowed the blackening solution to work. So I sanded them again... at the very end, I sanded the guns directly on liquid oil and left them like that
So despite the fact that I was using everything exactly as on Royal William, from casting alloy to blackening liquid (except for white spirit which this time was a different brand), nothing went the same.
P.S. When I say "I sanded" I mean I used rotating brass brush in my rotary tool
