Gunny's Stock Stain Improves with age

Beautiful: it must be a Top Secret formula.

Minwax (oil-based) Red Mahogany gave one of my rifles identical colors of reds and browns.

My primary question: your wood is Not Walnut?

It resembles the elm used by the Serbians ("Yugos") on their SKS rifles. I owned a pair.
And if Your wood is walnut,, was it fairly light brown before your Secret Stain was applied?

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I think it's gorgeous. I wish I knew the secret of getting grain to highlight like that. I wonder if it's the high humidity environment it was stored in?

Ignition Override

When I was restoring my Model1898 Krag Jorgensen I used Minwax Red Mahogany, along with a little bit of Walnut and Cherry, from a formula derived by a gunsmith friend of my Dad. He said it was pretty close in color to the surplus stocks he had worked on.

Anybody who takes the time to polish a bolt handle enough to reflect like a mirror gets my

wiscoaster

From what I read about the rifles the bolt and bolt handle were not blued but left in the white. So that's how I did mine.

I also didn't use any chemical stripper on the wood; I was concerned that given the age of the stock I didn't want to damage it so I sanded everything very carefully and managed to preserve at least one of the cartouches on the other side of the stock.

One of Gunnys many skills....nicey!

Dick, that’s the best looking Hackberry stock I’ve ever seen.
The secret to staining stocks is known what type of wood you have and it’s condition.
Most stain that you will find at Home Depot and other large retailers will be oil base. These stains are great for most woods, but do very little when trying stain hardwoods like Birch, Elm, Beech and some others that are used to make stocks. Knowing how stain will react to a certain type of wood goes a long ways.
A water base stain will do a pretty good job of staining most hardwoods, but then you must be aware of the condition of the wood. A water base stain will do very little to wood that is oily. So to use a water base stain your wood needs to be clean and oil free.
And then there’s dye. There are water base and alcohol base dyes. I prefer the alcohol base. An alcohol base dye will stain just about any type of wood, but be mindful, it will react differently on different types of wood, and the condition of the wood can also effect your results.
Birch takes alcohol base dyes very easily, but Elm seem to pull more of the red color from the brown dyes. If there’s oil in the stock, as most old military stocks do, this will effect how deep and dark your dye will get.
I had to learn about stains and dyes for matching and blending stock repairs.
Here’s a Finn M91 stock that I repaired a couple of weeks ago. The wood is Arctic Beech, it has a fair amount of oil in it and has a pine tar finish.
Before repair.


After repair.


After blending with brown and black alcohol base dye.

GunnyUSMC said:

...And then there’s dye. There are water base and alcohol base dyes...

Click to expand...

Extra note to guys thinking of trying dye staining: get lots of practice mixing and applying before you use it on anything valuable! I just recently started playing around with dye staining for another (non-gunstock) project and found it to be a totally different animal than the oil stains I was used to using.

That M1 looks a lot better than the one I carried through AIT in 1961.