oil-rubbed bronze door handles

Oil Rubbed Door Handles

Light or Dark or both?

 Choosing the right finish for your door handle can be a challenge. While the English language may provide innumerable ways to describe the color of a patina and while images of pieces in situ obviously help, we often find that perception of color and noun use are incredibly subjective. Moreover, the finish of the patina in our opinion should not be monotone but should allow for variation without which the patina piece will look dull and the beauty of the bronze alloy will be lost. 

Images are useful guidelines

The cabinet hardware pages of our website show each piece in a light and dark oil rubbed patina. 

As you can see from the above image, each piece has different flat and recessed sections and since the fluid patina settles in the recesses 2 different pieces finished with the same chemical patina may appear quite different. Smooth surfaces will slough off the patina so our contemporary cabinet pulls are light sand blasted to roughen the surface so the chemical can adhere.

Highlights 

Our patina artist has honed his craft over the years to create subtle beautiful finishes. The nose, toes and and tail tip of the gecko are very gently buffed as are the wing tips of the butterfly to re-expose the golden bronze beneath the patina.

Choose both?

Our door sets create a mix and match option used to full advantage recently by the talented Georgina Rice.To continue the plated nickel finish of the Willow pieces in the bathroom she designed while keeping the bronze tones of the hallway we plated the Willow knob in an enamel and oil rubbed the exterior knob.

Below you will see how the Willow knob set has been used to achieve a split finish knob set.

Making a door handle black - patination versus powder coating

Alloys like steel and bronze can be colored by immersion in a chemical patina such as the M20 chemical from Birchwood which is suitable for bronze or by baking on a layer of pigment powder to the surface of the handle. Neither method is superior to the other, but both have different benefits.

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316 Stainless steel is better suited to powder coating as this type of steel is hard, dense and corrosion resistant making it difficult for chemicals to penetrate or to form a chemical bond with. Our Morphic and Ergo collections are typically cast in 316 stainless steel an alloy that lends itself to contemporary door handle designs.
Copper is the primary metal in bronze, and it will readily react and oxidize when exposed to acidic chemicals to form a new micro thin layer. The color that develops through this conversion of copper will depend on the chemicals used and the colors can range from blue greens to red browns to black.  To create black, we use M20 a product made by Birchwood Technologies and one that contains selenious acid which is the component that oxidizes the copper turning it brown or black depending on the number of applications and length of each treatment. As the depth of color can be built up over several immersions it is method well suited to a patina where you want a range of color and a more organic appearance. As the patina is micro-thin several layers can be built up and then sanded back to reveal a range of color. If a uniform effect is wanted then the handle can be immersed in a bath of this solution several times to develop an even color of the required darkness.

 

By comparison powder coating works well on 316 stainless steel as the pigmented layer is baked on to the surface of the piece and no penetration of the surface occurs. Powder coating offers a wider and more controllable range of color and luster with a wide range of standard colors and custom mixes available from companies like Prismatic who offer a choice of over 6,000 colors. https://www.prismaticpowders.com