Removing the white lettering from a gun

There’s nothing worse than unsightly white lettering on a black gun, especially those that seem to have half the manual printed on the side of the slide ! I’ve seen (and tried) various attempts at removing it or at least recolouring it to match the rest of the gun, unfortunately at the worst they seem to do nothing and at the very best they seem to make it less obvious but still visible.

Which brings me quite nicely onto a method that I came across by complete accident a few days ago, which seems to work really, really well. Previously I’ve tried black permanent markers, acetone, isopropyl alcohol, black stove paint and even cold blueing solutions BUT none of them seemed to work well enough for me to be truly happy with.

I was working on my new Beretta holster, reshaping it to take my ASG X-9 Classic and I was waiting for it to dry out before using a black leather recolouring balm on it when I had one of those Eureka moments. I also had my KWC PT-92 out at the same time (as it resides in the same case as the ASG X-9) and it has a four line paragraph of those typical ‘read the manual’ type of warnings on the side of the slide, I wiped over the white writing using acetone to get it clean and then sparingly applied the black recolouring balm using a Q-tip and allowed it to dry. The balm itself will not stain anything that is not water absorbent, so I wasn’t expecting it to even stick to the paint at all but I just thought that I’d have a go. Once it was totally dry I gave it a good buff and was shocked by the amount of lettering it had covered, not completely but very nearly ! After applying another coat of the balm, allowing it to dry completely and then a quick buff, to my great surprise most of the lettering was now covered apart from a couple of very small spots where I needed to apply a few dabs for a third and final coat. The colour match to the black of the slide was very, very close, the main difference is that the leather balm leaves a very slight glossy look which is barely noticeable unless you really look for it under close inspection.
Unfortunately I never took any photographs of it before as I really wasn’t holding out much hope of it actually working but I’ve managed to source a picture of the same gun to show you the writing and then I've taken some pictures of it afterwards for you to compare it against.


This is what it looked like before, not mine (as stated) but exactly the same.


This what it looks like now !


In this picture you can see (when you turn it in a way to catch the light) that the lettering is still there (as it's embossed onto the slide by the original white paint) but it has been completely recoloured.


This one is a little closer and you can start to see where it's starting to catch the light an start to show the lettering up slightly, but this is pretty close too.


The ‘Balmy’ stuff…

The product I used is from a ebay seller called 'Furniture Clinic' and it's their own brand of black leather recolouring balm. I've used this stuff a hell of a lot for my black leather holsters and I even use their brown/camel version on my Cowboy gun rig, without a doubt this is a remarkable product for it's intended use and now I've found another use for it too. The cost ? It's about £5.95 for a small tub (free post).



I've got a Schofield lined up to get rid of the God-awful silvery white lettering on the barrel, fingers crossed that it'll work on that too.