Shaping and Finishing a Custom Rifle Stock

This tenth installment runs from the plain board to the first coat of boiled linseed oil.

The wood is eight quarter, curly white oak that has been quarter-sawn.

After the stock was cut to rough shape, and all of the metal parts were inlet, shaping began with a 4" grinder with a 36 grit flap disk. I failed to capture this portion but we pick up when the file and rasp work begins. The little piece of flat steel you see, is a wood scraper I made for doing most all of the wood shaping that I do. It's essentially the multi tool of scrapers as it combines all of the necessary profiles needed, in a compact shape.

The challenge here is keeping all parting lines crisp and intact. This is done by laying out in pen or pencil, and running your shaping instruments up to but not over these lines. Your finer rifles have all but the necessary portions of wood removed and this is what I did here. I don't use sand paper for finish work as it tends to excessively round things over. I do use a fine cut metal file to even some things out but the scraper handles 99% of the finished surface.

After the aquafortis is applied, you can see it reacting with the tannins in the wood, imparting a black color. This is flashed with heat to speed drying and oxidize the iron that was in solution. I give the full stock a liberal coat of boiled linseed oil, and vigorously rub it down with #0000 steel wool to knock off any hairs or raised grain, and let it set up for twenty four hours.

Further applications of linseed oil with steel wool will knock the black from the higher grain and expose a dark amber on the curl and a light amber on the quartersawn rays but that's for the next video.

Thanks for watching!

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