Howdy
Generally speaking, most attempts to simulate an aged finish look just like that. A simulated aged finish. Put one up against a really old and beaten gun and it stands out like a sore thumb almost every time.
I have a lot of blued guns. Very few of them have I bought brand new. Most have some honest wear on the blue. I don't mind a bit of honest wear on a blued gun, I know it has been used and not sat in a drawer for most of its life.
Another thing that many shooters do not realize is that modern blues are much more robust than the blues done in the 19th Century. Ruger is second to none in this regard, their blue is very robust. But some of those old worn looking guns look that way because the blue was not very robust and wore right off. Modern blue protects against rust. Once it wears off and the bare steel is exposed, rust can begin. I had a Cimarron a few years ago blued with their bright charcoal blue. It was truly beautiful, a bright almost robins egg blue. But within one year, the blue was completely gone from the backstrap and it was battleship gray from corrosion.
The very best way to put some honest wear on a revolver is to draw it from leather and reholster it. A lot. Just riding in a holster the gun will not wear. It is when it slides past the leather that real wear happens. It doesn't hurt to shoot nothing but Black Powder through them either, and not clean them right away.
Here is one of my 2nd Gen Colts. I shoot it a lot in CAS. We are sometimes a little bit rough on our guns in CAS. We draw and holster them a whole bunch of times during a day. Probably much more than most shooters who show up at a range to shoot. And our guns tend to get banged around at the loading table and unloading table too. All of the wear on this Colt is honest wear that has happened in the course of shooting it in CAS for about five years. This gun is not particularly old, it was made in 1973. I have owned it for about five years now.
This shot shows the typical wear pattern on a cylinder. The front beveled edges of the cylinder and around the flutes have had the blue worn off of them. The blue has been blasted off the front face of the cylinder in circular patterns by the blast out of the barrel/cylinder gap. That is not lead, the blue is gone. The nasty pits toward the rear of the cylinder were already there when I bought the gun. The colors of the case hardening are fading, they were much brighter when I bought the gun. Simple exposure to sunlight over a long period will fade the colors of case hardening. So will harsh chemicals, but this gun has not been subjected to anything harsher than BP solvents, which are water based.
The blue is wearing off the rear of the backstrap. This is mostly from my sweaty hand.
There is just a little bit of wear on the tip of the ejector housing. This is caused when the gun slides in and out of the holster. The scratches are probably from tiny bits of grit imbedded in the leather. I have seen Rugers with the paint worn completely off the aluminum ejector housing, from drawing and reholstering.
The sides of the hammer are raw steel, they are not blued. Black Powder has done a pretty good job of staining it.
Or you could buy a gun that somebody else stripped of all its finish, then shoot nothing but Black Powder in it for five years:
If you really want to try to distress the finish of a new gun, here is my old pal Longshot Logan's webpage. Longshot perfected some pretty good techniques for making new guns look old. Unfortunately, Longshot passed away a few years ago, but his website is still active.
http://members.cox.net/longshot_logan/index.htm
Have fun!
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