Stalking the Wild-Walnut Stain and Stock Filler

In my article last month on renovating an old shotgun, I mentioned using a homemade walnut stain and stock filler. Walnut stain is pretty inexpensive stuff, and there is really no reason you should feel obligated to make your own, but real do-it-yourselfers will probably relate to my story. I was trying to complete a project that had been hanging around my shop for several years’t hat of making my own muzzleloader, one part at a time.

I bought the pieces I couldn’t make like the stock blank, barrel, buttplate, lock, and triggerguard, but made every other part from scratch. When I finally got to the stock finishing, my mind turned to stains, slipped acog, and took the hard way out. I had always assumed that walnut stain came from walnut shells. But a quick search on the internet taught me that it actually comes from the husks that surround the shells.

That eliminated simply buying some walnuts at the store and concocting a stain from their shells. No, finding some husks would mean venturing into the uncharted wilds of the wooded area where the wild and dangerous walnut grows. Planning an outing of this type is not for the faint of heart.

One must first determine when the season opens. (It hardly makes sense to go hunting for wild walnuts if there are none to be had at the time you go.) So, some study revealed that, like most nuts, walnuts were best hunted in the fall of the year. "Ah ha!" I exclaimed. No wonder I see so many nuts running around the woods in the fall. After watching innumerable hunting programs on TV, you can imagine my shock upon discovering that there were no professional outfitters in my area that organized walnut hunts!

Without an outfitter where would I find a professional hunter with knowledge of the game, where to find it, and to help me distinguish between the trophy nuts and the ordinary ones? Where would I find pack animals and hired hands to carry the gear, set up camp, and cook sumptuous dinners after a hard day hunting? No lodge to stay in? No bubbling hot tub to soak away the day’s pains and bruises of the hunt? How can the civilized man be expected to venture into the wild without these basic necessities?

Thank goodness I live in the Midwest or my reputation as a gentleman hunter might have been ruined. Here, in the rural center of America it is not all that uncommon for a hunter to actually venture into the wild by himself, without benefit of the accouterments one typically sees on televised hunting shows. As September came, I realized that if I wanted walnuts, I was going to go it alone’without the benefit of a hunting lodge or even a professional guide.

Certain that this trip would never make it to the Outdoor Life Channel, I left my bush jacket, snazzy khaki shorts, custom rifle, and fedora at home. Instead, I slinked into the woods dressed in blue jeans, insect repellent, and carrying my own fivegallon buckets. I looked more like a farmer out to slop the hogs than the intrepid outdoorsman I know in my heart I am.

Once in the woods, I set up my spotting scope, and started scanning the trees for "walnut signs." Soon, I spotted the little green balls of walnut husks in the trees. (I assume the wild walnuts leave a few behind on the tree as long as possible to act as sentries and to alert the pack should predators invade their territory.) Next came along cautious stalk. In the best TV hunting tradition, I was careful to keep upwind of the tree at all times, using every piece of available cover to conceal my movements.

I moved from bush to tree to clump of grass in a low belly crawl, bringing my buckets up behind me in a drag bag. Suddenly, I came around the last bush and before me was the prize I had been dreaming about all summer. A pack of wild walnuts lying peacefully on the forest floor’completely unaware of my presence. The moment of decision was upon me. Would the pack stampede as I fell among them? Could I pick out the real trophies before they all disappeared?

Nerve-wracking moments passed as I tried to plan the best strategy. I decided to start picking off the stragglers one at a time from the edge of the pack so as not to spook the others. I quickly filled my buckets and beat a hasty retreat to my truck, all the while keeping an eye out for the ferocious sabertoothed fox squirrel that is rumored to inhabit these woods. Soon I was on my way home with two buckets full of prime specimens.

When I got there and told the tale to my wife, she suggested that perhaps I’d watched one too many hunting shows. Women just don’t understand this adventure stuff.

In a couple of weeks, the husks will have turned brown and can be shucked. Dried husks can be saved for future use. In any case, making stain from walnut husks is the silliest process you can imagine. The husks come from the tree green and are impossibly bonded to the nut within. The first thing you have to do after collecting them is wait for a couple of weeks as they slowly turn from hard green balls into a soggy brown mess.

Then, wearing rubber gloves (unless you want to have brown hands for the next several weeks), you separate the slimy husks from the nuts. If you want waterbased stain for immediate use, you can mix some of these slimy husks with water at this point to make a powerful stain. Surprisingly, you can save this stain for quite some time. I thought it would soon grow fascinating things in the bottle’m olds, fungi, creatures from other planets’but after several months I’ve seen no evidence of any growth at all.

I assume the mixture is rather acetic and retards the growth of microorganisms. To be on the safe side, the best bet is to make up only as much as you need for immediate use, and then spread the husks out on apiece of cardboard and let them dry. Once the husks are dry, you can break them into the smallest pieces possible. A powder would be ideal, but small chunks work just fine. This way you can store them forever and mix them with water to form stain anytime you need some.

I got the bright idea of making a solvent-based stain, and tried mixing them with odorless mineral spirits. I can’t tell you why this doesn’t work, but those tiny chunks of walnut husk that turn water into stain in just a day or two simply refuse to dissolve or release their brown color into mineral spirits. After weeks of soaking all I had was a yellow-colored liquid that looked a lot like a urine sample. My next choice was an alcoholbased stain.

Filling a small canning jar about 1/4 full of dried walnut husks, I added regular rubbing alcohol to it and set it aside to see what would develop. Unfortunately, not much happened, so I cut it 50 percent with water and got a stain of dubious quality. The idea was to produce a stain that evaporated faster and did not raise the grain, but with enough water to increase the drying time. My advice is to simply stick with water for a solvent unless you’re the adventurous type that likes to experiment.

I also found it possible to make my own stock filler by placing the walnut husks with just enough water to cover them in a blender and letting it run until the mixture is about the consistency of a thick milkshake. The filler is then slathered onto the stock across the grain to fill the pores in the wood. Once the "slurry" is dry, you simply sand the stock down with your preferred grade of sandpaper and the grain will be filled. An extra bonus is that the stock will also be stained at the same time.

Two notes of caution are in order here. One, don’t use your wife’s blender! You and I know that this is a waterbased material and will wash out. That’s just logical. Your wife, however, will see you put dirty, smelly stuff into her blender and logic will go out the window. I know because my wife walked in just as I had a handful of hulls poised over her blender ready to drop in. A scream rang out and for a moment I thought the tornado siren had gone off.

My explanations regarding the nature of the hulls and the fact that she had not actually used the blender in years fell on totally deaf ears, and the project was put on hold for a few days. Save yourself a world of aggravation; go to a local resale store or flea market and buy your own blender. I got mine for $3 (about the price of a bottle of commercial walnut stain). Second, should you decide to store any leftover stock filler, fill the container only about half full.

Little did I know that, over time, the hull material in the mixture would continue to absorb water and expand. This makes

it less effective as a stock filler, and if you fill a tightly sealed container with the mixture, one of two things will happen: Either the container will break from the pressure that builds up inside (staining anything in the surrounding area), or when you open the container, like I did, the contents will leap out like a Jack-in-the-box or the creature from the 1950"s horror picture The Blob. "Run, run for your lives! Oops, sorry, that cog slipped again.

Picture a canning jar in the middle of your workbench with your freshly sanded and prepared stock ready for finishing. You start unscrewing the cap, and the next thing you know a blob of stuff shoots out of the jar. You stare in horror and reach for a rag to wipe it off, while this volcano is spewing forth a thick mixture that is running under your freshly sanded stock. You react, snatching the stock off the bench, spattering the wall, bench, and tools in the process.

About that time the flow of filler reaches the edge of your bench, runs onto your belly, staining your shirt and the skin beneath it. You react involuntarily, jerking back and allow the mixture to run off the bench and onto your shoes and into your socks. But hey! I saved a couple of bucks and made it myself. Now that I have enough dried walnut hulls to last me a lifetime, I wonder how cherry and maple stains are made? What color would I get if I did the same thing with hickory hulls? Hmm.

Come September, I think I’ll plan another trek into the wilds of a Midwest wood lot. Once the bug bites, it itches and a real guy has to scratch what itches. I