doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Dry wood problem

So I have seen many a stock with insane amounts of oil soaked into the wood. I now have a piece off the other end of the spectrum. This gun must have sat in the desert for 40 years; then when someone found it, they must have left it, dragged a wood stove out to it, and let it sit another 40 years between the Wood stove and the desert sun. It is insanely dry, has split along several grain lines and was drawn tight around each screw.
Will anything revive it?
Can it be soaked in a particular solution.
And if there is no real savior a would a 20 minute bath in an ultrasonic cleaner be terrible?

Yeah, that is not the ordinary wood problem seen. Normally, one sees the guns that have been oiled to death, usually by a penetrating oil like WD-40. That softens the wood so when the gun is fired, the wood is compressed, becomes loose and cracks develop and the stock is ruined. Never use penetrating oil. However, the dried out wood has the opposite problem that can cause the same wood failure. This one needs oil. Certainly not penetrating oil. I'm not sure which oil might be best, but I doubt if walnut oil would hurt. I think periodic wipe downs would be best, maybe followed up with glass bedding.Anyone out there have experience with this problem? Usually, dry stocks are not this dry. Since there has already been wood failure, a new stock may be in your future, but first try oil and/or bedding.

Here are a few products I use:
Old West Snake Oil
Howard Feed-N-Wax wood preserver
Formby's Lemon Oil Treatment
Walnut Oil
Bob Jurewicz

I shot 100 clays yesterday in the rain. Maybe try that?

A word from the desert, where Paradise Season has finally arrived
Dry rot is hopeless
Dried out has some hope
Vintage boating and furniture restoration folks use boiled linseed oil
http://thecraftsmanblog.com/revive-old-wood-w-boiled-linseed-oil/
and Endeavour Wood Oil
http://prep-productions.com/endeavour.html

Perhaps if you built a tank from PVC pipe filled it with boiled linseed oil and then put the stock in and put it under vacuum pressure that might help to renew the wood.

Steve

BTW I have had wood temporarily swell when I soak a stock in acetone to remove old finish and oil staining. However, it soon shrinks as the acetone evaporates from the wood. However, it does show that wood will absorb fluids and expand.

Walter Snyder's answer is probably closest to being correct. An extremely dry piece of wood didn't lose linseed oil, walnut oil, or lemon oil. It lost an excess of bound water from its' cells, and once it has reached that point, adding oils or finishes will only inhibit the return of moisture. If you bring extremely dehydrated wood to a more humid climate, lost moisture will slowly return, but stress drying cracks will not magically heal themselves. And oils will only make it more difficult to stabilize and fill these cracks. Equilibrium moisture content in most of the U.S. is about 12%, and kiln dried wood used for furniture is typically dried to around 6-8% which keeps it pretty stable with the indoor humidity of most homes.

Once your "dry as a popcorn fart" piece of wood has reabsorbed as much moisture as it will in your climate, which may take months, you might be able to stabilize the stress cracks with filler coats of thinned clear epoxy, and then doing the final filling with a slurry of thicker epoxy and fine sanding dust. If this is gun stock wood that is already even with or slightly below metal surfaces, you would want to absolutely minimize any sanding of the stock surface, so you could use very fine walnut dust from another piece of walnut. I'd use a vibrating electric sander or random orbit sander to make my pile of very fine sawdust. Of course, walnut sawdust mixed with epoxy gets pretty dark, so you might wish to use lighter sapwood dust. Using the plastic spreaders used for auto body filler might make it easier to do this filling without excess build up on the wood surface. And you'd want to use a slow setting clear epoxy to give yourself time to work before it starts setting.

amasing!

Keith, I like your answer and it follows what I've noticed in natural settings. For the past four years I've been living and traveling the US in a 33' RV. However, I tend to winter in SE Arizona for the sunshine and quail hunting. I've noticed how, after a month or two in Sierra Vista, the wood on my guns begins to shrink slightly and parts become loose. For example I have an old percussion SXS that I made a wood ramrod for and damned if the copper end, which I'd glued on with epoxy, didn't almost fall off one day. A month or two after I'd left Arizona and resettled in Montana it was tight again. The dry air is damned hard on human skin as well.

Steve