Does anyone have any hints or tips on refinishing beech wood stocks? I have a Husqvarna .22 single shot (model 165 for those in the know) I'm currently stripping because the former owner looks to have applied a coat of polyurethane with a banana. The wood appears to have been dyed in the past too, so hopefully when the stripping is complete, I won't have to re-color. I'm hoping to use oil to topcoat. Anyone know how beech reacts with oil finishes?

Cut it off and replace with Walnut?

Thanks Brent, but even though I'm refinishing it, I would still like to keep as original as possible.

Husqvarna and beech go hand in hand. Not that they did not use walnut, but they certainly liked to use beech. I believe it had something to do with the war years and not being able to import walnut for an extended period.

Yes, I was only kidding.

On the only Huskie that I have refinished I used some Minwax stain, I believe it was simply walnut stain, and a shot of cherry red dye from track of the Wolf. It came out quite nice. However, I am not sure what the wood was. I did not think it was beach but rather a light walnut as it had some figure to its grain.

Beech can be notoriously blotchy when using penetrating stains and sometimes aniline dyes, so I figured I would ask ahead of time if I need to color it.

It sounds as if you already know a lot more about staining, refinishing, and the characteristics of beech than BrentD, the guy who is running a campaign to financially damage this forum. Why, you even know how to spell beech.

Minwax, and other finish manufacturers make a Pre-Stain Wood Conditioner that partially seals very porous wood to prevent the problem of uneven stain absorption.

https://www.minwax.com/wood-products/preparation/minwax-prestain-wood-conditioner

Watco Danish Oil might give a nice tone to your stock without any additional stain, but I like to try a test piece on a scrap of the same wood before I commit to doing the entire stock. If you try six different neutral wood finishes on the same wood, you will get six different appearances. If you can't come up with a scrap, you might do a test in a small area in the barrel channel.

Thanks Keith... great suggestions!

The only test area you have is the barrel channel. Use it to get a feel for how stains will look. Might find a combination of them works best.

Go to your local Woodcraft store, and buy a piece of Birch.
Then go over to their wood finish department look at all the little bottles of dye that they have. They’ll have sample pieces of each one of the dyes on maple in every color.

Depending on what you’re attempting to do, you may build a finishing sequence of up to eight steps.

An example would be trying to get an entire bank of cabinets made from different pieces of wood, to all have the same color and tone when you get done.

So, I’d prolly dye it ebony, then sand that off irregularly
Then a wash of cherry dye for red over black, not black over red.
Then a spit coat of garnet shellac. That will give you a mottled reddish overall look with some dark under color. And enough tooth to get your final layers where you want them.
Then a scuff sand.
Then awash of med walnut gel stain over that, then a coat of oil over top.

You build your color in layers, even it out with the toner in the top coat.

Or do something else entirely.
Figure free dense hardwoods are not easy to make look like something else.
You can add just enough mystery with layered toning to get the next guy to wonder what’s under it.

OMG!

Good point there Keith. About the best I've seen on "Beach" is a shapely lass in a bikini.

You do know that beech and birch are different trees entirely? On top if that he is working with a European variety of beech. Use the barrel canal. It’s the same wood. Completely hidden and already on hand. About as simple as it gets.

Stain it with Minwax English Chestnut. It looks more like traditional walnut color than either of Minwax's walnut stains. If that does not look as good as you would like, come back over it with Timberluxe stain AFTER the Minwax has thoroughly dried for a few days. The quality of your sanding job will determine how it turns out.
JR

The best stain I've come across for Arctic Beech Was some I'd made up from Nitric Acid and clean steel wool dissolved in it. Was left over from another project on ancient muzzleloaders and had sat for awhile. The wood was cleaned and the stain applied, scrubbed to get the green oxidation off, and, if I remember, it got the True Oil treatment. Appeared as top quality Walnut!!

Yes KY Jon, most of us know the difference between beech and birch. Well, all except for BrentD, who can't even spell beech... and Clapper Zapper, who advised the OP to do a stain test on an entirely different wood species, and then to attempt some eclectic mix of materials and methods to achieve what I'd expect to be a garish result that might satisfy someone looking for a camo finish.

This is the internet, and we must always be careful to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I think you guys would find dying of beech maple and birch with multi step finishing regimens pretty common in furniture and cabinet making.

Making a straight grained dense hardwood look like something else is a great learning endeavor. You’ll see why using an alcohol or water based dye becomes so important to the finished result.

No reason to dismiss out of hand what artisans have been doing for centuries.

Arctic,
Aqua Fortis.....quite nice on any sugar wood. I just did a Southern Indiana .36 cal long rifle using it. Easy to use and pops the grain.

I have been using garnet schelac to get the right color and then add a coat of true oil to protect the shelac. vary the coats of garnet
bill

I managed to get the poly off with 2 stripping sessions with citristrip. I can now see that the previous refinisher had a blotchy result from whatever dye he used. Tomorrow I shall try some of the suggestions to see if we can't blend it into a balanced color. Thanks all...

You may wish to put dye in the finish to even out the tone.

And then you may learn that those all-in-one finishes with stain in them are one of the worst things ever concocted. If you wish to go down that road, best you experiment on scrap wood. You can only sand mistakes off your stock so many time before you screw it up.

Do you include “Red oil” in your indictment?

When I used this "traditional" stain treatment on a tiger-striped maple long rifle stock the green didn't become evident until about three years after the final finish. I'll never use it again.

SRH

Certainly. And most definitely with a wood like beech that is notorious for uneven stain absorption. I find it much more controllable to use either a home-brewed alcohol based alkanet stain or Behlen's SolarLuxe prior to applying my final finish. But if your unconventional furniture and cabinet finishing techniques give you the look you want on a gunstock, go for it.

Oh, I'm not recommending Japanese Shou Sugi Ban to gussy up this beech stock either, although that technique made some nice tool handles when I finished them. Too much potential for a bad result for a first try on a rifle.

Did it have chromium in it? I think it may have. There were/are a number of concoctions that do seem to feature that green and I think it might be chromium, but I can't recall for sure.

A good aquafortis stain will never turn green. I built this rifle with aquifortis close to 20 yrs old and still dark brown on maple. And of course, most antique maple muzzleloaders haven't turned green. In fact, I have never seen one that has. So, perhaps not all "traditional" finishes are traditional.

I dissolved iron filings in the acid. Was there chromium in the iron? I don't know. Best I remember it was filings from cold rolled steel. I went by the original formula the best I knew how. Others told me they have had the same results, with the green tint coming later.


There are a lot better "traditional type" stains out there to use for m/ls.............like Homer Dangler's.

SRH

Well, I don't know what happened with yours. Probably the acid you used. But in any event, mine has not had that problem. I don't think it will, so it can be done.

Back in the late 1960s, there was a muzzle-loading group in the area where I live. One gentleman had personally made more than 50 rifles. He gave me some help & advise on mine though I did the work myself. Nitric acid was often used on the stock finish. Before I did mine he warned me occasionally one would turn Green, & he knew of no way to predict or prevent it. I went on with the acid. Brushed on the acid, then dried it with a propane torch After the acid treatment I coated the stock with Potassium Permanganate until it turned Black. This was rubbed then with steel wool dipped in linseed oil until the desired tone was reached. It turned out really good & has never gone Green. This was on Curly Maple.

Another method I discovered later is to coat the maple with a strong Tea solution then set the part in a sealed container, Cardboard Box will work, along with a dish of Stronger Ammonia. The Ammonia reacts with the tannic acid in the tea & turns it a most beautiful color. I have not done a stock this way but have done some pistol grips & several other items.

This process is said to have originated with Oak "Mission Furniture" except the oak had its own tannic acid & did not need the tea treatment.

I have no idea how chromium would reaction in the wood finishing mixture or on that particular blank, but I would be confident there is some chromium in 'CRS'. I believe it is recycled and I wouldn't count on it being consistent batch to batch other than it's likely a mild steel.

I don't really trust my memory of what was supposed to cause green stocks, but it was a very common problem and some actually liked the effect back in the 80s.

I have a pair of rifles that I treated with the same bottle of nitric acid solution yet turned out very different. One is the rifle with the antelope above. I don't have a photo of the other handy, but it is very red. They are both some sort of curly maple but certainly from different sources and perhaps the wood makes a difference.

Anyway, I've never had one turn green.

Absolutely nothing unconventional with red oil or adding alkenet directly into a modified oil finish. Duane Weibe had a wonderful pictorial on his website for years on how to use this technique. I have used this method for many years myself and never once needed to sand off the finish. The beauty of this method is that when you cut back using rotten stone and the colored finish as a lube you do not get light colored areas. Nothing at all wrong with an alcohol based stain and the method you use but it is hardly the only acceptable method of obtaining a quality stock finish.

I wonder how the yellowing of approved finishes is interpreted within the manifesto ?

If you don't mind me asking what does your reply have to so with refinishing beech ?

Here's my tip beech is going to look like crap no matter what you do

Winchester, of course, was famous for using a secret recipe for red oil finishes on their rifles. But then, they were Winchesters after all.

You made that donation yet ?

Steve, I am well aware of the technique of red oil sanded in finishes. Also aware that there is more than one way to get a good finish on a stock. But we are not dealing with walnut here. I feel the stain mixed with the finish on beech would be more difficult to control on a wood notorious for taking stain unevenly. More difficult to correct if it didn't turn out well too. But I already said that. And the unconventional methods I really questioned was that psychedelic furniture finishing tutorial that seemed intended to apply some unusual effect to make plain hardwoods "interesting".