Why isn't maple used in more shotgun/rifle stocks?

Of those woods English yew and Osage orange [proper name bois-de-arc] are tough enough to resist heavy recoil. Both are very shock absorbent and tend to flex rather than breaking. Both have been used for centuries in the making of bows.

My Dad did a Herter's birdseye maple stock and forend on a Win Model 12 16 ga in the early 70's, along with a Herter's Belgian hot blue job. I was there and I helped and it was a great learning process! I was in the USAF on leave at the time in 1972 and was invited to a pheasant hunt in David City NE and we went. My Dad was shooting a Ruger Red Label O/U 12 ga and I had the Win 12. I killed two roosters and everyone else came up empty handed. My Dad then proceeded to let his wife use it as a trap gun when they went to Wednesday night shoots and she did somewhat well with it. When he died in 2010 the gun and the wood were very much intact, and I could not coax my MIL to let me have it.

The birdseye maple always did the job with this shotgun and never went south. Maybe you did not as good wood as could be. It happens.

The maple they use guitar necks it strong, and it's very hard. No idea how the stresses compare, a neck has a steel truss rod inside it to adjust the curve induced by the stress of the strings, but somebody told me one time the stress of the stings can be as much as 200 lbs. Most necks with maple fretboards don't have a replaceable cap there, you're just pushing the strings straight into the wood of the neck, and it takes a long time, years, before it even starts to gouge out a little wood there.

The old growth maple that was lost back in the day around the Great Lakes is desirable stuff, a bookmatched piece large enough to make a guitar body can cost thousands of dollars.

My maple rifle should look a lot like Slamfire's by spring. It was my grandmothers rifle, lots of family history in that gun. Just a no-name bolt action 22 single shot, but it's maple. My understanding of maple is that it gets quite brittle when it dries out. Certainly not a good quality for guns with any significant recoil. I have seen maple on other older 22s and 410s as well, but never on centerfire rifles or shotguns bigger than 410.

Beautiful Stock and rifle, Slam.



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The maple they use guitar necks it strong, and it's very hard. No idea how the stresses compare

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The maple that is often used in guitar necks is pretty strong, but it does not take impacts well. Broken headstocks are a very common problem. Maybe the most common serious problem.

a neck has a steel truss rod inside it to adjust the curve induced by the stress of the strings,

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Exactly. To set the desired "neck relief" and prevent fretted strings from touching frets further down the line and killing notes.

but somebody told me one time the stress of the stings can be as much as 200 lbs

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That depends on the tuning, scale length, string gauge and so forth, but usually it's right around 110 lbs., total, pulling in a direction that the wood can handle very well.

Most necks with maple fretboards don't have a replaceable cap there, you're just pushing the strings straight into the wood of the neck, and it takes a long time, years, before it even starts to gouge out a little wood there.

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Yes, though that's a wear/abrasion issue, not an impact that's being resisted like a rifle in recoil. Drop a guitar and a surprisingly small impact will break the neck, usually where the grain direction changes at the headstock.

One thing that's very often done is to use many pieces of wood -- even the same wood, though often laminates of various things - to build up a neck. Like plywood, changing the direction of the grain by flipping the laminations greatly increases the resistance to deflection and cracking. Adding glue joints doesn't weaken the wood at all, and the more opposing the grain paths are, the stronger the laminate.

The old growth maple that was lost back in the day around the Great Lakes is desirable stuff, a bookmatched piece large enough to make a guitar body can cost thousands of dollars.

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I had a pal years back who shot sporting clays each weekend with a presentation grade Beretta Silver Pigeon that he'd bought from someone who worked for the company. It had a stock that was very blond maple, but marbled so that it literally looked like stone. The gloss was utterly liquid. You'd think it was wet. He was super proud of it and thought he'd gotten a steal of a deal at a bit north of $8K back in the day.

Yes, also the base of the headstock is the terminus of the truss rod, and it's also the thinnest part of the neck. Dropping a set neck guitar may well result in a very expensive pile of kindling, depending on how the break runs it might not can be repaired. I know someone this happened to, luckily for him the guitar had only cost him $900. (As for the total tension of a set of strings, I remember now the guitar in question was a 12 string acoustic.)

I saw a photo set of a guitar made out of that old wood that was salvaged from being submerged in a bay, just the raw wood cost $6000, it was just fantastic. Imagine how much the whole tree must have been worth. I know that Ed King (the former Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist who wrote the music for "Sweet Home Alabama", among others) bought just the neck from a vintage 1950's Telecaster for about that same sum, it's used on his favorite guitar today. The body of the original guitar had been damaged beyond repair, don't remember how.

OP is 6 years old.
As mentioned, away back then, there are hordes of different maples. Not all of 'em are suitable for stock wood. Sugar maple, as I recall, is one that is not. Nor is Norway maple.
And the English(really Welsh) bowyer used Spanish yew. The Welsh long bow had the inner bark left on the away side. That's what gave the bow it's extraordinary spring.
Osage didn't make particularly strong bows either. Native bows were nowhere near the draw weight as a long bow.

I saw a photo set of a guitar made out of that old wood that was salvaged from being submerged in a bay, just the raw wood cost $6000, it was just fantastic.

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Yeah, look up "bog oak." Or this unearthed cypress: http://www.finewoodworking.com/2004/12/01/ancient-lumber-from-new-zealand-and-south-carolina. Or ancient Kauri wood, salvaged from long buried pits and dating 30,000 years old! Ridiculous, and priced to match, I'm sure.

know that Ed King (the former Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist who wrote the music for "Sweet Home Alabama", among others) bought just the neck from a vintage 1950's Telecaster for about that same sum, it's used on his favorite guitar today. The body of the original guitar had been damaged beyond repair, don't remember how.

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Oh sure, but the prices for '50s Gibsons and Fenders don't have anything to do with the quality of the wood. It's all in the condition and collectability of the complete guitar. A real '59 Les Paul might go for a million these days.

I've stood in a shop next to a display case containing a '50s Tele with over $28,000 on the price tag. That little bit of ash or alder, and the maple for the neck, were nothing special at the time. In fact they were very inexpensive.

Kind of like what happens with a lot of guns! How much is it worth? Depends on how old it is, who owned it once, what the condition is, how rare is it, and how froggy a buyer is feeling that day!

Well, in a way it does have something to do with the wood, the older guitars were made with wood that was older growth trees and hand-picked to a greater degree, and cured for longer periods. Or so "they" say. I must confess to not being conscious of as big a difference as the true connoiseurs do, but to them these big premiums are apparently worth it. I've owned a couple of vintage Strats over the years but the best one I've ever owned was made in 1997, so maybe I'm just low-brow.

While this is an enormous digression (!), naaah. Leo Fender wasn't picking superior pieces of alder or ash and curing them for especially long periods of time when he built his Braodcasters, Teles, and Strats. He was buying whatever he could get inexpensively and then slathering them in automotive paint and managed to make great guitars as fast as he could go. Is a vintage alder and plain maple Strat worth less than a similar vintage mahogany and ebony Gibson? On average, not really.

Now, it is absolutely true that old growth, dense, wood is not as easy to come by today as it once was (for many reasons, though mostly in the US due to the decimation of forests in the industrial age quest to fuel iron furnaces. The best type of mahogany is largely extinct due to the fact that it was cut to fire boilers and steam engines of central and south America). I just don't agree that the wood was that much better, or that it very much matters (at all, really) to the quality of the guitar. Or that a $28K telecaster (with it's slab body, bolt-on neck, and dumb saddle design) is expensive because of the cheap wood Leo used to build it.

(Ok, Ok, enough guitars. Bad Sam, bad! )

OR GUN, because we're really talking about guns here! I never did figure out if that glossy maple stock made my pal shoot clays any better.

Maple might not be the best stock material, but it sure is pretty. Saw a Model 70, I think it was, in a store a while back, stocked in maple, and it was drop-dead gorgeous. Far too beautiful to take out in the woods and get scratched up - it was a piece of art, really.

I used highly figured Maple to fashion Kentucky rifle stocks back in the early '80's, and never had any problems.

Tiger Maple stocks were pretty common in those days.

Of those woods English yew and Osage orange [proper name bois-de-arc] are tough enough to resist heavy recoil. Both are very shock absorbent and tend to flex rather than breaking. Both have been used for centuries in the making of bows.

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I wouldn't try it. Set a gun with an Osage Orange stock on the ground and it's liable to root and grow.

I have 2 maple stocked T bolts - 22 LR and 22 Mag. When I go to the range with them, I draw a crowd. Do they shoot any better than the walnut or plastic stocked editions? No, but maple stocks are just downright pretty! Who would look at Victoria's Secret catalogs if they used ugly women for their photo shoots?

I always found hard wood easier to carve than soft - I never have been able to sharpen well enough to get the cuts in walnut that I can in maple. I have seen some hard-kicking rifles in maple (muzzleloaders) that never much cared about the recoil. To me, figured maple looks best on a flintlock, walnut on a modern rifle. Dunno why, but if I had a really pretty, figured maple blank, I'd be inletting a swamped barrel and a flint lock.

Dunno why, but if I had a really pretty, figured maple blank, I'd be inletting a swamped barrel and a flint lock.

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Agreed! While I don't have anything like an exhaustive survey, it seems to me that maple was much more the usual stock wood back in the flintlock era, and I'd say that all of the real masterpiece flinters I've seen seem in my recollection to have been tiger stripe maple, or faux'ed up to look like it.

Ironwood (aka American Hophornbeam). That's the wood! I have no idea if anybody ever made stocks from it. It was very popular for making wooden jack planes, wooden thresholds, etc. Hard AND tough. Used in knife handles but it's not attractive.

xfyrfiter said:

Of those woods English yew and Osage orange [proper name bois-de-arc] are tough enough to resist heavy recoil. Both are very shock absorbent and tend to flex rather than breaking. Both have been used for centuries in the making of bows.

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And both are a PITA to work with!

berettaprofessor said:

I wouldn't try it. Set a gun with an Osage Orange stock on the ground and it's liable to root and grow.

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And then you'd have hedge apples all over the ground....

When I moved to the Dallas area, I asked a local for directions to somewhere, and they included, "then y'all turn onto Bodark Street..." I got to where I was supposed to turn, and the sign said Bois D'Arc.....which I would pronounce (correctly) as Bwa-Duh-Ark. Where's that facepalm smily?

I partly disagree with the strength assessment. This is just my guess for a really old thread, but I am betting the weight has something to do with it as does how I think you can find a pretty piece of walnut for a lot less than a pretty piece of maple suited to this type of use.

For example, pool cues/shafts are often made of rock maple, and I've always been told this because the hard maple used has outstanding compressive strength, elasticity, and impact resistance. They must withstand an immense amount of force with a ceramic object with virtually no give, with the only buffer being the cue tip (some of which are very hard and have little give either), only to repeat this process tons of times!

I've also noticed that the price associated with the most cosmetically pleasing of cues seems to shoot up really fast. Cues with strongly pronounced birdseye patterns made of that type of hard maple meeting the necessary performance requirements are pretty and insanely expensive, where as ones without the desirable cosmetics are often more affordable but IMO very plain looking. For example, I have a cue from a solid Maker that I paid about $600 for that uses a relatively plain looking piece of rock maple with some beautiful inlays...they have $2,000-5,000+ cues that, other than perhaps a tiny bit more inlay work, are built by the same people using the same tools with the same degree of attention but just using a much prettier piece of rock maple. Where as I've seen a lot of affordable guns with very pretty walnut stocks, I'm not sure if they could make something from maple at the same price that looks equally good. I could be wrong.

I have a lifetime of experience with supplying Maple, Walnut, and several other woods for Gunstocks. Fir those who,do not think they are tough, guess again. The US Military has more stock experience than any outfit I know of. Maple stocks, and I own a number of them are both attractive and durable. Same for Walnut. Toughestvstocks we ever tested in the military were wood laminates, they are also heavy. Know this, even within a species there are considerable variations in weight and hardness. If you think Tiger Striped stocks are going out of fashion, guess again! Our breakage in the military of synthetics is much higher than you would think. However I have seen wonderful synthetic stocks. I have had rifles for which I tried five different stocks. The oldest rifles I personally know of are maple stocked. Not one I have seen was broke. When we ship out blanks for sale to firearms manufacturers and custom stockers they are swatted against a boulder several times wearing special gloves, trust me it is a rough job. If a rifle won't shoot accurately I would restock it or sell it, if I sold it I'd be darn sure to say what it's apparent accuracy was. Almost every rifle I have seen was capable of quite reasonable accuracy. I also think that the for super light runs to a degree contrary to tough and durable.
Given a requirement of only choosing one rifle, personally I would go with a laminated stock hand fitted to my shooting style. I also avoid super thin profile barrels.

Meh,I prefer brunettes to blondes anyways

Maple CAN make a very serviceable, very nice looking stock. But it is more expensive, harder to work with, and heavier. In spite of that at one time it was the preferred wood for stocks. No reason it couldn't be used today as long as someone is willing to pay the price and deal with more weight.

Walnut wasn't chosen as the preferred wood because it was pretty. It became the standard because it was the cheapest readily available wood that met most of the qualities stock makers needed. Not too hard, nor too soft. Fairly light weight and strong for it's weight.

But over the years good walnut is getting very hard to find and expensive. Synthetics today are more common for exactly the same reason walnut was initially chosen. It is the cheapest alternative.

Used to be used in muzzleloaders.