Maintenance and Protection of Wood on Rifles

C

Clevinger

New member
What products and process do you gentlemen use for protection and maintenance of your wood? And how often? :confused:

I have a Model 70 Super Grade I want to stay nice forever. I hunt with it too though...

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I do stock work for a living. I recommend that my customers use Johnson's Paste Wax or Trewax. Both are much softer than Carnauba wax, penetrate to seal and are actually very good at cleaning the surface of the wood. Apply with a soft cloth, let it dry, then wipe off the excess.
 
Kiwi or Carnauba

On the wood, I too use pure Carnauba wax. Supposedly it is the hardest natural wax on the market. Carnauba is not a brand but a type of wax that comes from a nut. I have used a combination of beeswax and Carnauba. Can't recall the name. It's messier and smells. Most of the time, I use shoe polish like Kiwi. Birchwood Casey sells a stock wax that has Carnauba in it. :rolleyes:

Be Safe !!!
 
For raw/unfinished wood, I like the look of many (8+) coats of tung oil. Linseed oil works well too. But most stocks aren't unfinished. Even the dullest factory stock generally has at least a couple layers of polyurethane finish on it, in which case I'd just use paste wax.
 
I'm working on a stock at this writing. Removed the factory finish and using tung oil ( after some walnut stain). On some others that do have a factory finish, I use the Birchwood Casey wax.
 
If the finish is a sealed factory finish, just put the wax on it. If it's an oil finished stock, just take a few drops of Boiled Linseed Oil and put it on your hands, rub them together, and then rub it into the stock. If the wood is really dry, a few more drops of BLO might be needed.
 
Imagine my surprise when I found a superb piece of walnut under what I considered to be a rather cheap and under-finished factory stock. A blond-ish, light-ish spray and shellac or varnish or poly coat of some sort. All stripped with a sharp knife, then stained with a dark walnut followed by tung oil.
To be honest, I mentioned that I intended to "keep it nice". I actually banged it and scuffed it a bit when putting all pieces back together again. It sort of fell out of the fixture while I was trying to align the screw holes. I dinged the stock and made a blemish. But you know what? A drop of oil and the rub of a rag and it looks just fine. Hard to ruin the looks of this deer rifle. Dark walnut stain is really soaked into the wood. Turned out every bit as good as I hoped for. I regret having no "before" up-close pics to share with my deer camp buddies.
 
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