It’s been a while since I made my last amplifier knobs and it was nice to come back making them. This time I had interesting challenge ahead – I had to heat blue 3 knobs. Material was regular mild steel, which blues to very nice deep black. In the past I’ve had several projects, where bluing worked out fine, but also sometimes it didn’t. Let’s just say the process wasn’t quite worked out yet.
Long story short – I had to reblue these knobs about 10 times, before I got it perfect. Fortunately it seems that I got the process worked out and with next projects I wouldn’t have to mess around so much.
The other lot of knobs was 7 stainless ones, but also with a quirk. The top part of knob had to be concave. Not having CNC lathe and making them by hand was quite an interesting challenge. Fortunately client didn’t need them as 100% identical and slight variation was OK.
The result is here: