Are Baseball Bat Woods Good For Rifle Wood?

Ash is hard, dense, but not terribly flexible. For gun stocks, it is heavy, homogeously puke colored, and looks like hammered ugly when you sand it and stain it.
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Why in the world would you want to stain ash? As a professional woodworker I used to tell my customers that if you want a dark wood, go with mahogany or walnut.

When coated with satin lacquer or polyurethane, ash is beautiful. It has strong grain that is highlighted by a good finish.

This is my CAS guncart that I made of ash about ten years ago. The nameplates are not ash, they were made from pallet wood by a machinist friend who used to like to make up boards like this on his CNC miller.

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I made our kitchen cabinets out of ash, sprayed them with poly and kept the naturally light color. It's different than the more ubiquitous oak but we like it and have received many compliments. The characteristics of the wood seem to lend itself to being a good choice for gun stocks.
 
A couple of things. First off, gun stocks made in the USA are not made of English Walnut, they are American Black Walnut. Juglans nigra. English Walnut (Juglans regia) is also known as Persian Walnut. English Walnut is a European species. American Black Walnut is a native North American tree.
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Gun stocks in the USA are indeed made of English walnut and European walnut. Both are probably more correctly classified as Persian walnut, but the woods are distinctive enough to be broken down even further into Bastogne, French, English, Turkish, Circassian, and others varieties. English walnut is a widely cultivated commercial species, used primarily as a pollinator. Most of the walnuts you buy in the grocery store are grown on European walnut or English walnut trees, grown on Black walnut root stock (protects them from root rot). The trees grow for about 50 years, and when production declines the wood harvested from those nut orchards is seasoned and sold to be used for furniture and other decorative purposes.

Black walnut is also commercially cultivated, although not as widely as it once was. About 100 years ago, black walnut was the principle commercial cultivar, but people prefer walnuts that are easier to shell.
 
That is why new standard factory stocks look like crappy plastic. Farm raised trees are "Pushed" and get plain, straight grain in them. We used to find these Japanese trees growing around farm dumps. Palonia (Spelling?) trees. They fetched a premium price in Japan because the commercial grown trees did not have the good grain of the wild ones.
 
I have a fancy walnut stock from "Stocky's Stocks" that has two pieces of carbon fiber sandwiched between the walnut and probably a 1/4" mahogany layer between the carbon fiber layers.

This stock is pretty, but also very stable. Stocky's hasn't advertised them recently, so I don't know if they were discontinued.

Birdseye maple has been used by some stockmakers, but it's difficult to machine and can be very heavy. Remington made a run of their 541 sporters with it and they were beautiful!

JP
 
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