30x170 Restoration

[Falcon]

Heres a restoration I did while I was still at school. It is a steel cased 30x170 Dummy round, with holes drilled in the case and a wooden rod inside. I was given it by a guy at a car boot sale who said he'd bring down "a rusty shell in his garage". Apparently he found it on a beach. I thought he was going to turn up with something live, luckily it was a dummy. He gave it to me for free to get it out of the way.

It was in an awful state when I got it, completely rusted, all paint gone.

To restore it I simply put it in a lathe in the school workshop, ran it at about 500 rpm and ran some emery paper over it while it was spinning to take off all the rust. I turned the aluminium nose cone down in length by a few mm, as the very end of it was bashed beyond revovery. I also ran some emery paper over that while it was in the lathe and then polished it with brasso to make it shiny again (like it should be, unlike brass) I then re-sprayed it in its correct colours from a photo of a complete round I found on the net. Here is the finished round. It is slightly pitted but turned out quite well compared to the state it was in when I got it. It is not in 100% condition if you look closely, but it looks good on display.

 

[spotter]

nice transformation falcon

 

[Chris 42 RQ]

Excellent restoration job!!
At first glance you would not know how rough it once was.

 

[DAZ REICH]

Instead of trying to take the pitting completly off and making it a different size or getting frustrated with one bit of pitting that cannot be removed ,and if you are going to repaint anyway use a filler ,i use an araldite type two part epoxy glue ,it sets like concrete when dry just make sure you start sanding it down when it is touch dry.
Will put my first restoration pick on here later using this method ,you should of seen the state of the projectile i did it with yuk.
DAZ

 

[Falcon]

You told me the araldite projectile restoration trick in the thread about my 25mm Hotchkiss round, sounds like a good idea. It would mean stripping all the paint off again to do this round so I don't think its worth it.

I would like to do more restoration stuff, but unfortunately I don't have the time these days, I did that round while I was still at school. Luckily the DT Technician knew what he was looking at and let me do a few things like removing dents from artillery cases, rather than having the whole school sealed off and the EOD called in.