Refinishing Fine Stocks

Many an old rifle or shotgun has splendid wood hidden under a collection of vast amounts of crud accumulated over the years. If you can recognize a jewel within the stock wood under all those signs of age, you might want to consider refinishing it. So you grab your paint remover, your belt sander or maybe an orbital, chuck the stock in a vise and have at it. Most likely the result of such treatment will be clean wood with absolutely none of the original quality of the stock’s shape or nicer attributes remaining.

I’m sure you, like I, have seen plenty of examples of this sort of thing over the years. Let’s say your great uncle left you a fine old shotgun with sound metal but with a thick coating of varnish on top of layers of lacquer with some questionable oil, wax, and what-have-you sprayed, brushed, or slathered onto the wood along the way. If you could make the wood look great the whole gun would then look great. How do you do it?

I’ve refinished many dozens of gunstocks over many years, and these include extremely costly double rifles, fine British shotguns, excellent-quality bolt-action rifles, and quite a few The biggest change is in the much-increased contrast to the wood grain. relatively common firearms. Many times I’ve tried to write up how I do a stock finish but have always been stymied, because on each different stock I end up doing whatever it takes to get the right result. That seems to change with every stock.

However, I’m finally going to try to explain here at least some of my basic procedure so others might benefit from my long experience. If you have doubts as to my abilities, there’s a photo of me refinishing my $40,000 Churchill double .470 in my book, The Alaskan Retreater’s Notebook. There’s also a photo of me in that book refinishing a low-cost .22 target rifle with a birch stock. Been there, done that. First, some advice: Don’t use ANY power tools to refinish a fine gunstock!

In fact, don’t use power tools on any gunstock, not ever! Hand work is all that’s needed and it’s not hard work. More advice is to picture the gun with a glossy, like-new stock wrapped around ancient, rusty, pitted metal with little or no bluing remaining. Is it time to redo the metal? Or maybe you could just tone down the gloss of your new stock-finish job to make the gun look somewhat more harmonious.

Or maybe just leave the whole thing alone and cherish the patina of age the old gun has honestly acquired over time. The Gun I recently sent a bunch of fine old guns to a major auction house to raise money for a big personal project. I nearly sent along a fine old Westley Richards 10-bore double gun with Damascus barrels. However, I’m very fond of the old Westley, so at the last minute I decided to hold it back. Westley Richards’ records informed me this gun was made in 1880.

I’ve owned this bundook for more than 20 years. It fits me like it was made for me and I’ve shot it extensively at clay birds. I’ve never missed a clay bird with its right barrel. One day I took it to a Cowboy Action match and the grand old lady stole the show. Every shooter there gave her a good, close look and cheered when she mowed down three iron targets with one shot.

I had the old brown barrels refinished by Keith Kearcher, who did a superb job, as he did on several other Damascus barrels on British firearms of mine. The bores are clean and nice and the gun throws exceptional patterns. I’m all set up to reload for it so, except that I currently have no use for it, there was no good reason to let it go. The only flaw in the gun is that its stock was refinished long ago by someone who didn’t really know what he was doing and I’ve never been happy about that.

The flats on the stock behind the action should have had sharp edges but have rounded into something ugly. The grain was hidden by what looked to be heavy varnish but which was probably

Top He’s used it for over 40 years to refinish gun stocks. The two on the right are cabinet scrapers that might be better if you learn how to use them. Bottom This throws up burrs that do the actual work. some sort of old, yellowed, quickietype "oil finish." It came off more easily than varnish. The butt stock should have had straight lines and been sleek. Instead, it bulged.

The odd-shaped silver oval inletted into the stock stood proud of the wood by a sixteenth of an inch or more, just one more thing that wasn’t right. Old British guns require extensive knowledge about their woodwork—how small details, Lots to go. lines, flats, etc. should look—in order to be able to do a proper job of refinishing. I happen to have some of that knowledge, hard won, and decided to put it to use on my Westley. It turned out to be necessary to remove the stock from the action.

Most refinish jobs are going to require that as some areas can’t be accessed unless you remove the metal from the wood. The incredibly simple Anson & Deeley action came easily out of the wood with the careful removal of a few screws. Note that British gun screws generally require thin blades on the screwdrivers. The Tools The next thing to do was to attack the old finish with a suitable scraper. I used the same scraper I started with over 40 years ago.

It’s basically a thick putty knife with metal 0.040inch thick and a straight edge some three inches long at the bottom. I put cutting edges on the putty knife by securing it in a vise and pulling a file flat along the bottom edge, which throws up a burr on each side of the blade. This burr is what does the work. I have used this tool to remove a great many finishes.

More than 40 years ago I used this tool to remove the epoxy finish from a German Weatherby and more recently did the same thing to the epoxy on my CZ 375. Both rifles had fabulous wood beneath the epoxy finishes that hid much of their beauty. With the epoxy off, some linseed oil could soak into these stocks and emphasize the grain. The result in both cases was glowing wood. So yes, this simple scraper, or something similar, is where to start.

You might want to try curveedged cabinet scrapers, available on e Bay from many sources. I have a pair that I use to improve violins by scraping their inner wood but prefer the straight, flat edge of my old putty knife over the odd curves of the cabinet tools when doing a gun stock. I know exactly what that straight, flat scraper will do but am unsure about the curved ones. It’s your choice. If I had as much time in on the cabinet scrapers I think I’d prefer them to the flat cutting edge of my old favorite tool.

Grab the scraper, press it gently against the stock and have at it, removing the old finish a line at a time. Avoid digging into the wood. I pull the scraper toward me, always going with the wood grain. A gunstock is curved almost everywhere, so as you scrape you’ll be making tiny flats with a straight-edged scraper. To some extent you can pull the scraper at an angle across the stock, somewhat across the grain, and get rid of most of the stripes you’ve made.

If your stock has flutes next to the pistol grip you’ll use just a tiny part of the scraper and pull it only about an eighth of an inch with each stroke. Convex surfaces require lots of small scrapes. You’ll end up sanding the wood anyway, so don’t fret.

You’ll still have to clean up the checkering but don’t make work for yourself. I have found the use of a scraper to be the fastest, most controllable way of removing old stock finish. You’ll quickly learn to control it. I used my old putty knife on one of my violins that had a horrid pebbly finish all over and just that scraper got it down to nearly bare wood with no damage to the thin surfaces.

The Technique I got all the old finish off my Westley in a day’s scraping, just having fun with it and not slaving over the job. The scraper can also remove wood. With it I was able to remove the worst of the bulge from the right side of the butt stock and was able to once again give the flats behind the action the sharp edges that should have been there. Try not to dig into the checkering with the scraper. Scrape up to the checkering but not over it.

You’ll probably have to sharpen up the diamonds to get rid of the old finish, but you really don’t want to cut all new checkering. Cleaning up old checkering is one heck of a lot easier than doing it all brand new, I promise you. With all the old finish off, the next task is to sand it. Some caution is advisable here. One of the quickest ways to destroy a gunstock is to round edges that are supposed to be sharp. The front of the stock mates with the back of the action.

If I round off the edge at the very front of the stock the effect is a huge gouge, or "hog wallow" as Elmer Keith used to call it, where the wood dips in behind the metal instead of flowing into it. The use of hard-wood backers to the sandpaper and some careful thought how to proceed will help keep things sharp where they need to be. The butt plate on my old Westley is horn, not hard rubber. As such it’s subject to cracking. This butt plate is at least 137 years old, so I treated it with caution.

If your gun has old horn like this, be careful! When I took the butt plate off to redo the buggered screws that held it, the plate relaxed slightly into an arch that no longer matched the wood. My solution was to recut the curvature of the wood to match the That’s not right. Unfortunately that job also took the wood slightly below the surface of the matching metal. One has to live with that. Don’t make it worse. horn, not try to straighten the horn. This was easily done with a sanding wheel on my Dremel.

Yes, I have a variable-speed Dremel that qualifies me to call myself a master gunsmith. Humor aside, I turned the speed down to avoid overdoing the job. Most of the wood came off the outer edge of the butt wood because the original setup had the central portion of the wood carved out so the plate touched primarily at the edges, not in the middle. The plate was originally held on, or patched sometime later, with what appeared to be gobs of ancient hide glue.

This was a mess and highly toxic as airborne dust, as I found out. It cost me a day in bed. I reinstalled the butt plate before I did my final scraping and sanding so I could match the new clean wood surface to the butt-plate edge. Again my The Westley Anson & Deeley action comes out with the removal of a few screws. Here the top lever is removed. That small screw halfway out lets the locking plate come out. The trigger plate needs to be dropped and then out comes everything.

scraper did most of the dirty work of blending the two surfaces, and the sandpaper finished it up. I use 220- and then 320- and 400-grit wet-ordry type with oak backing or sometimes a felt pad a quarter-inch thick that I got from Brownells many decades ago. Here and there my thumb was the ideal backing. You might want to go to 600-grit paper and I have no argument with that. Careful and thorough sanding is good insurance against seeing sanding marks after you make the stock really shiny.

Just be sure the wood is as smooth as you want it before you apply any finish. I have left off the task of whiskering. In my experience ancient gunstocks don’t require it. But if you must do this, understand it’ll open up the grain considerably and require lots more work to fill the pores. The whiskering process is simple: Dampen the stock wood with a wet paper towel and dry it quickly over heat, such as ared-hot stove burner.

This raises the grain, which you then have to cut off with either fine steel wool or fresh fine sandpaper. Do it several times until the grain no longer raises. Use the wetor-dry paper dry. The Finish With the wood scraped, smoothed, sanded and, if desired, whiskered, be sure to wipe everything off with clean, dry paper towels or a soft cloth. The first thing I put onto the wood is something called alkanet root oil. You can The checkering will have to be cleaned up later, after finishing.

The butt plate was replaced before the scraping was done. Here a file is laid on top showing the gaps at front and back. More work with the scraper removed most of this, giving a better-looking stock. make your own and several sources online tell you how. Basically it’s alkanet root powder in something like linseed oil with a bit of turpentine. I had some remaining from a Purdey Warthog Kit I bought some time back. This alkanet oil darkens and slightly reddens the wood.

To me that’s what was needed on this old Westley. Wipe on a good coat, rub it in somewhat, let it sit a few hours, and if needed, do it again until it looks right to you. Be sure to wipe off any excess oil. Your stock will undoubtedly have some slight bits of open grain, though the original finish will still be filling some of the pores to some extent. If you were gentle and didn’t dig into the wood, a lot of that "filler" will remain. But you’ll really want to fill all the pores.

There are several ways to deal with that. The easiest is to "… fergit filling the pores and jes’ rub oil on it" and no one will ever complain about it. At least not to your face. A better way, sometimes used by master The post protruding from the wood is an ancient patch when the lower retaining screw was moved even lower. This was a clever way to patch a hole in the horn plate.

Author found it necessary to recontour the wood slightly to match the stress-relieved plate. stock maker Al Linden, is to fill the pores with varnish. Top-quality spar varnish, specifically. But if you’re going to do that I recommend holding off until you get the alkanet oil and some linseed oil into the wood first. What kind of linseed oil? I’ve used the stuff you can buy by the gallon at your hardware store sold as Boiled Linseed Oil. I’ve also used "artist’s quality" linseed oil and it’s lovely.

Dries a lot faster than normal oil. I’ve also heated common "boiled" linseed oil for extended periods of time when I used to heat the oil instead of the stock to apply it and it turned into something better than what came out of the gallon can. Author used 220 through 400 grit paper.

This can be removed to some extent with careful application of heat and paper towels to soak out the oil. It’s a good idea to then put on a coat of shellac to the inside wood surfaces to help avoid later soaking-in of oil.

It brings out the grain and imparts a rich slightly reddish stain to the wood. to get linseed oil into the stock is to get some oil on a wad of paper towel, turn on the electric stove’s biggest burner to full strength, heat the stock wood carefully above the burner, and then wipe the oil onto the hot wood. Repeat this carefully so as not to set the oil or wood on fire. Don’t drip the oil onto the hot burner. Don’t scorch the sharp edges of the stock because the burn marks won’t come off.

Wipe more oil onto the hot wood, repeating until the stock doesn’t seem to want any more oil. Thoroughly wipe off all remaining oil with clean, dry paper towels, rubbing hard. You don’t want the oil It’s time to put oil into the wood. In years past he heated the oil too, but that’s somewhat risky. Give the stock all it’ll take, wipe it dry, and repeat after giving it time to soak in. It’s possible to fill the grain with this technique.

Rottenstone works too, as does good spar varnish. on the wood, you want it IN the wood. By the way, this is how wood golf-club drivers were treated long ago, or so I’m told. I have a Jack Nicklaus driver that I did this to and it improved the club in looks, hardness and avoidance of cracking. Do the linseed oil treatment several days in a row, or you could let it dry for several days to a week between sessions, and then do it again.

After awhile you may want to cut the residual oil down to the bare wood and you’ll find the pores are largely filled with linseed oil. If you have a gas stove the same technique can be used but you’ll probably burn the wood or set the linseed oil on fire before your job is done. I’ve done this task on gas stoves but you have to be careful to never get the oily rag near the flame nor let the oil drip onto the flame. I recommend only the use of an electric range or some similar source of dry, safe heat.

Getting back to Al Linden, if you want to fill the pores with varnish, then as soon as the wood looks nearly as dark as you want it from hot linseed oil and/or alkanet root oil, apply a coat of best-quality spar varnish. Linden recommended many thin coats, but I’ve found one unthinned coat does the job nicely. This will blend to some extent with the linseed oil, so you don’t have to wait months for the oil to dry before using varnish.

When the varnish is thoroughly dry, sand it down to the bare wood and the pores will be essentially fully filled. I’ve used varnish just one time, on my .338 OKH, and that was over 40 years ago. The rifle spent lots of time in extreme cold in Alaska and I took it to Africa in 1995. That stock still looks wonderful. The finish has stood up, the pores are filled, and I think that finish is a bit harder and more durable than just plain oil.

If you use varnish to fill the pores, once they are filled to your satisfaction go back to the linseed oil applied hot. I’ll bet you won’t need many coats to get a fine finish. The ancient time-tried method of keeping an oil-finished stock in good shape was to occasionally put a little linseed oil onto the stock and rub it into the wood with your (well washed) bare hand until the stock gets hot from friction.

Long ago, I watched Alaskan master guide Andy Runyan rub linseed oil by hand all one evening onto one of his favorite rifle stocks. I used to do that too. That’s still an accepted way to do annual maintenance on an oil finish, but my hands can’t take it any more, having been mistreated with linseed oil, various thinners, gasoline, motor oil and grease, photo-dark-room chemi-

338 OKH (.338-06) Mauser over 40 years ago. It still looks fabulous and has no open grain, despite years of extreme cold and intense heat. The checkering had been stained dark and that made a hard job harder. A simple tool is all that’s needed along with a toothbrush to remove the dust. Forty years of practice and the patience of Job help. cals, extreme cold, and other nasty crap for many long years. Today I use nitrile gloves and a paper towel.

I applied two coats of Purdey’s alkanet root oil and four of linseed oil to the Westley. The wood is darker now, a pleasant change from the awful finish it sported when I got it. The grain shows more contrast, thanks to the alkanet oil. With that done, I needed to fill the pores. There are several ways to do that and I already mentioned varnish. Do not use commercial wood filler on a fine gunstock. One old method of stock finishing and pore filling is still commonly used. It involves what’s called slackum oil.

This is a compound that consists largely Here’s how the top lever looks after the author’s rust-bluing, the only type of bluing proper for such a classic old shotgun. of linseed oil with various driers and some wax added. Formerly available in the discontinued Purdey’s Warthog stock-finish package, today you’ll have to make your own. Find recipes for it online. Basically this stuff is wiped on, allowed to get tacky, then rubbed off with linseed or other rubbing oil and wiped dry.

This leaves some of the sticky slackum in the unfilled pores. The next step is to anoint the wood with rottenstone. Wipe a small amount on evenly with your hand and then rub or polish the stock with a soft cloth. The rottenstone sticks in the pores and eventually fills them as you repeat the process of applying slackum oil, rubbing it off, applying rottenstone, and final polishing. The result is lovely, and gives you a shine James Purdey would be proud of.

If you don’t have, or don’t want to make, slackum oil, you can let the stock with its hot-applied linseed oil sit for while, up to a day (be sure to wipe it completely dry before you let it sit.) Apply rottenstone sparingly, wipe it onto the stock evenly with your hand, and then polish the stock with a soft cloth. As with slackum oil this has the effect of filling the pores and imparting a shine. You might experiment with rottenstone and linseed oil together, which I’ve tried but can’t say I loved the result.

It did seem to fill the pores quickly. The stock is done when you say it is. You can make it shine so as to knock your eyes out from glare, if you so choose. If you want to leave some pores not quite filled, no one will notice. If the finish gets too shiny, try rubbing it with Bon Ami cleaning powder. That’ll cut it down to a dull finish. If you don’t like that result, make it shine again with linseed oil and rottenstone as detailed above.

When I decided the finish was done to my satisfaction on my old Westley, three tasks remained. They were to recut the checkering, which I did, and that was agony because some dolt stained the old checkering and I had to dig it all out. Then I rust-blued the top lever, bottom plate, and trigger guard. The third task remains, which is to engrave my monogram into the silver shield on the stock. Then the grand old girl will be ready for several more centuries of reliable and good-looking use. How to recut checkering?

It takes a couple simple tools. If you want to checker your gun when it never had any, you’ll need one more tool, and you do it after the finish is all done. How do you do it? I’ll tell you in a future article. And how do I do rust bluing? We’ll think about that. AG