I've only had occasion to re-finish two CZ's.
The first one was an old Pre-B with badly chipped paint I bought as a beater. It wound up with a nice gloss-blue finish, and a couple years later, I sold it to a friend who fell in love with it, sometime back in the 90's. I'll admit that the process of polishing the gun to prepare it for the bluing rounded off many of the harder edges all over the gun, and knocked down quite a bit of the detail and depth in the lettering, which fact I was never crazy about.
The second CZ I had refinished was actually a brand new gun at the time, a CZ 75B that I bought back in 1996 for $299 at a gun show. They could be had really cheaply back then! I hand-picked it out of more than a dozen that the dealer had. I got into it for such a good price that I decided to send it out to have it hard-chromed, after hearing how durable a hard chrome finish would be. I knew a gunsmith in Largo, Florida that did great machining work, and he had his own bluing and plating equipment. He did a STELLAR job stripping the polycoat without ruining any of the features or detail of the gun, and then professionally hard-chroming the entire gun, and its magazines. He also gloss-blued some of the controls. For the chrome job, he put a beautiful semi-polished and brushed finish on all the flats of the gun, but he left all the contour surfaces of the gun in a cool, light matte bead blast finish that looks like a whitish "frost". This is the nicest hard chrome job I've seen on any firearm.
Unfortunately, instead of putting my "highly durable" and very inexpensive new sidearm through its paces and making it my number one beater for range work and hunting/camping sidearm, I couldn't stop staring at it. It wound up relaxing in the safe looking super sweet, only coming out for occasional range outings, while I banged up and ruined something much more expensive and less durable LOL!!!
My favorite refinish....here she is hiding out between a 1991 CZ85 Pre B, and a cool factory gloss-blued 1993 transitional CZ 75 Pre B....
Anyone else have a good refinishing experience that turned out better than expected, and pics of the result?
