doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com "Tiger Tail" in walnut stock: A good feature?

To the experts on gun stocks: I read sometime ago, in an English publication, that dark stripes going across the grain, known as "Tiger Tail" are a desirable a feature. Asides from estetics is there any other reason for being a valuable feature?

I restocked recently an old sxs, using local walnut and when visiting the gunsmith for my first fitting I found that the new stock had more vertical stripes than a Tasmanian Tiger.

tiger stripe (can be known as fiddleback) is attractive. I don't know that it is any more or less structurally sound or that it has any other advantage other than aesthetic though.
RG

No expert, but different species of wood with the same type of flowing grain are called different names in certain wood. Most of the time "tiger" is referred to maple, fiddleback to walnut, birdseye (possibly caused by fungus)to sugar maple (hard maple) although have seen it in pine and some cherry, and is seen in birch,(yellow) and walnut.

Quarter sawn wood gives another view, especially in white oak. A lot of Victorian furniture is made in quarter sawn white oak.

A lot of your Pennsyvania long rifles were made from curly maple.

As far as being valuable, it is all supply and demand. Most of your good gun stock wood with crazy grain and figure is from the crotch of the tree or down near the base, or root. Drying this wood is difficult because the grain is running different ways and it's hard to stabilize and dry without cracking, so the price goes up also.

Was at a lumber shed years ago and saw a piece of fiddleback mahagany, bought it for the regular price of mahagany and made a nice 5'x 18" side table from it. You can actually feel the waves in the wood. Don't know how the planer didn't rip them out.

Post some pictures when you get it, it's always nice to see great wood.

I like fiddleback walnut because the figure changes with the way light strikes it! Bobby

EJ, Just curious, what species is the "local" walnut in Chile? I have read that fiddleback is most prevalent in Black Walnut, and that no one knows for sure what causes it in a tree. But supposedly a tree that has it will exhibit that grain structure throughout the tree to the smallest branches. I see a lot of it in Claro and very little in English. Last summer I bought a full pick-up load of very nicely figured Pennsylvania Black Walnut slabs that I got to hand pick out of a large quantity. Only a couple pieces had any fiddleback.

Tiger stripe, fiddleback, curl, whatever name it goes by is caused by food material (photosyntate) produced by the leaves and sent down the trunk to the roots for storage. As trees age the roots tend to fill up with stored food material, and the excess produced is then transported to the center of the tree by the storied ray cells. It is this food material in the storied ray cell that produces the off-color curl or stripe. the food material is nothing more than one of the 8 or 9 basic sugars of which our common table sugar is one. If you look at wood under a microscope you'll see these ray cells running at a 90 degree angle from the rest of the wood cells. It can be very evident in the white oak group in quarter sawn lumber as was pointed out about Victorian furniture. A number of species will show stripe/curl, whatever, but it seems to be more common in Maple, Ash and Walnut. It does not weaken the grain structure of a stock blank in any way.

Curley Maple, both hard Sugar and softer Red maple were the woods of choice for 18th century flintlock longrifles made in Pennsylvania and other areas. Occasionally a Walnut stock shows up, but usually it was Maple with curl/fiddleback/stripe. Most New England, Hudson River and British Style Fowlers were stocked with American Black Cherry, and it is unusual to see any curl in these.

While I'm not familiar with selecting stock blanks for modern doubleguns, I am up to speed on stock blanks for contemporary flintlocks and caplocks. Curl increases the value of the blank, and the more (tighter is the trade term) curl it has the more valuable. Five or more stripes per inch significantly increases the value. A friend who is in the sawmill business will use a hatchet and closely examine likely trees for curl, and when found will usually dig down below the root collar and cut the tree off maybe a couple of feet below the root collar. When sawn, this will produce a downward curve of the grain pattern through the wrist of the rifle or smoothbore fowler or whatever is being built.

It's a shame that I'm not smart enough to figure out how to post photos on the Board. I could show a few pieces with various amounts of curl/stripe and desirable grain pattern. I have a flintlock doublegun, 16ga, stocked in English Walnut that has beautiful stripe and grain patterns that would illustrate what I am saying very well. Here is a website of a friend who has built several pieces for me including the doublegun. this will give you a good illustration of several patterns of stripe/curl.
http://www.dtdodds.com

Some pics
http://www.parkergun.org/forums/view_topic.php?id=5035&forum_id=1&highlight=fiddleback

It is curious now, for a second a feel that it may be not walnut, I´ll check tomorrow (again) with the two gunsmiths involved,the one that sold it and the one that worked on it. Anyway Keith, being walnut, it must be Juglans Regia, the only one imported and planted here from different European countries.

Southern forests lack most tree species known in the Boreal zone, so we don´t have local indigenous versions of walnut to the best of my knowledge, like you have in North America. I wonder whether there is a local variety of walnut in New Zeland or Australia. Trees from these two countries have more in common with trees from Southern South America than from the Northern Hemisphere.

I'm not aware of there being any sort of native walnut here, although there are timbers like it, and other local timber species moderately prized for stockmaking. Eucalypts of many varieties are the dominant species here.

This is on a Stevens 5000, nicest wood I own, on a hardware store gun. Someday I'll redo that checkering....