doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Stock blank or firewood?

Not all stock blanks are equal. This one is serious firewood grade. Both sides bad. Worse is it was kiln dried.

Too good for fire wood .Might be able to be slabbed and made into a nice small table top ,dependent on size .
I once paid a lot of money for a large blank that was either the prettiest stock seen for a long time or scrap . Fortunately for me it worked out but it was a gamble .This is not .

I once bought a dried highly figured guitar tone wood set that resembled this. I have a controlled environment storage area for wood but within two weeks the wood had developed so many cracks it was useless. Even relocating wood like this can cause problems.

It could be made into something nice. Live edge furniture is insanely popular right now. I made a dining room table and a bar top with wood like this three years ago. Fill the cracks with black epoxy, level and sand then apply pour on table top epoxy. It looks incredible. The only touchy part is degassing the finish at the proper time using a quickly moving propane torch. Not hard but not forgiving.

This is what a young man did with a tree Burr in the 1920s. My late Farther in Law was given a burr though at the time he was given it the wood was already half a centaury old and as hard as bell Brass so much to hard to work with normal carpentry tools. His Farther owned a Agricultural Engineering factory and using a band saw usually used for cutting metal he cut the Burr into a couple of planks and bolted together this stool. He was nor sure if the Burr is Walnut or Elm, My wife lived with it all the time she was growing up and has a love hate relationship with it because it is so heavy for such a small piece of furniture that if you walk into it it takes no prisoners but does leave you with bruised shins. So if not a gun stock there are a lot of other avenues to explore.

Those TV shows where they dredge rivers and find logs that have been underwater for 100 years or more are interesting. Years ago I could have been one of three guys at my club to have a Silver Seitz trap gun made from the same tree of Birdseye curly maple. But at $12,000, I had to pass. 😔

That walnut blank will make some nice turkey calls. Several years ago, I purchased a similar blank determined unfit for a gunstock blank that worked out well for making turkey calls. By the time you cut and turn down the wood, most of the imperfections are gone. Anyway, it worked out with the blank I tried.

You've got to love the knots !!

Prove everyone wrong!

JR

Love what that young man did. But more so, the story. Thanks for the “show and tell.”

I love the stool. No chance I would even consider changing it into a gunstock. Leave it just like it is.

Firewood is indeed the first thing that comes to mind. But there might be enough sound wood for a set of handgun grips, some pen blanks, or knife scales. Then there's always the walnut scrap box, which you keep in case you need a small piece to use for a stock repair.

On the bright side, it is easy to see the direction of grain flow through the wrist section. Just follow the deep checks and cracks. Flip it over and fill the checks with clear epoxy, and you might be able to make a stock with extreme drop like this Lefever. Until this, I don't think I have ever seen a gun with stock dimensions suitable for a giraffe. I wish I knew the story behind it:



I do like the old burl wood bench that damascus showed us.

Many tree slab cutters do the pressure injected resin technique to stabilize big table slabs.
It follows bug runs, cracks unseen,crevices,worm holes, etc.

I’ve seen some videos where it was done by vacuum and also by gravity.

A highly figured blank might really respond to the treatment.

I’d impregnate it with ebony black resin and see how it shaped up before I discarded it.

Partly out of curiousity, and partly because synthetic and semi synthetic stocks are much more acceptable today.