How To Age Shiney Gold Door Handles

Brand new brass hardware such as drawer pulls door handles or towel bars stays shiny and bright for decades because of a protective lacquer coating on the surface.

How to age shiney gold door handles.

I read somewhere that heating the brass up with a flame would help it tarnish quickly. Luckily it s easy to transform shiny brass to create a lovely antique finish that will look far more stylish. Let s face it door handles don t stay gleaming for long and endlessly polishing away grubby fingerprints is a pain. However by removing this protective coating and applying either ammonia fumes or brass ager to the surface you can age your brass hardware to give it a pleasing tarnished.

Brass fixtures and fittings were all the rage a few decades ago but that super shiny look has fallen out of fashion. New brass is a shiny golden color but over time it darkens and takes on a green brown or reddish patina. Before you use either method you must remove any lacquer on the brass first. I grabbed my candle lighter and got to firing that brass knob.

Read on to discover which method to. I have also included a way to age brass so it takes on a verdigris color. I knew i had seen on the internet before using some kind of heat source or fire to age the metal but of course i couldn t find a good tutorial anywhere when i was looking for one. The first uses a product called brass ager.

Sometimes bright shiny silver is great but on this project i wanted to keep that old rustic look so i had to figure out a way to add some age to them quickly. If you prefer the appearance of older brass there are several ways to hasten or imitate aging. So at this point it just looked like a scratched up slightly lighter colored 1993 brass door knob. The second method uses water and a few household products.