Glass Bead Blasting 1911

[vavulaka]

Hi guys,
I’ve been working on my first 1911 build for a bit over a year and a half now. I’m done with all of the fitting and blending. I even test fired it and it functions and cycles great.

So I’m currently working on finishing the metal. I’m hoping for a smooth satin finish.
The frame and slide as well as everything else is stainless steel so I’ve blasted the whole thing with 120grit aluminum oxide and then with 80grit glass beads. I was hoping that the glass beads would give me a nice smooth finish, but what I got was a porous surface that caught every finger print and any dirt/oil that was on my hands. Furthermore after I oiled it, the bright satin finish turned gunmetal grey. I didn’t mind the color, but the finish was so sensitive that bumping it with a screwdriver caused a scratch.

I did some research on a few 1911 forums and it looks like I need better beads 60-120 mesh (240grit) seems to be the perfect recipe to get something resembling an Ed Brown-like finish.

Here’s the quandary - I need maybe 5-10lbs of the stuff, but everywhere I look for Ballotini 60-120 glass beads, they sell them at 50lb buckets. I don’t need that much nor do I want to drop $60 on it if it’s going to lay around my garage for years. So I’m hoping that someone who reads this can either make a suggestion as to where I can go to buy the beads in smaller quantity, have some Ballotini 60-120 beads I could buy off of them, or perhaps have a totally different suggestion for me altogether!!
I found some Blast-O-Lite 70-100 glass beads at 10lbs but I’m not sure if the quality of the beads would be good to achieve what I’m looking for.

Thanks in advance.