Chic, or anyone else out there who knows, would this work for a rifle stock, maybe on a double rifle from Butch? I don't know enough about it, but I have a rather large piece that a friend gave me that would be big enough. Thanks, Glen.

Quint 6,
It most certainly will,rifle makers have been using Black Walnut for years,maybe centuries???
When you see references made like American Walnut Stock they are usually talking about American Black Walnut.The Root system and "stump end" usually have the prettiest figure.Black Walnut is a touch soft but not too bad,it's colors can range from blonde to almost black.Got lots of it growning here on the farm and a nice tree in my yard,the nuts make for first class eating too and the shells can be ground up and used for a varity of this one being "walnut Shell media" for cleaning brass in a tumbler.The hulls from the nut can make dye and are also used to boil traps in to color and descent them.Hope this helps. rws2

Black walnut makes excellent rifle stocks. I happen to prefer English walnut (and all its various nicknames) but the black makes great stocks. If you are planning a rifle project, the wood is one of the few things you cant upgrade in the future without going through all the expense again. So unless the wood is what you want as far as grain layout etc. then look around

Chic

If you're going to invest a lot of money in a custom project, you should definitely choose a nice blank to start (color, contrast, figure, layout, density, etc.). The extra cost of an above-average blank is very small in relation to the cost of the overall project, and the finished product will be much more pleasing to you and and others in the event you decide to sell it later. High-end projects almost always start with dense English or its varieties. Bastogne is nice too. Claro is softer and more open-pored and doesn't hold checkering quite as well but is probably the most beautiful and can be purchased very reasonably. Black walnut has of course been used for decades by the major manufacturers, is similar to Claro but not as highly figured and colored.

Good enough for use in all U.S. rifles up through the M14. Good enough for me.
Most US gunmakers use it for their stocks too.

Customstox - does a significant strength difference exist between a high quality wood stock and a laminated stock? For instance, on a CZ550 converted to 500A2?

KMule,
In my experience a good piece of walnut (straight grained and sound) is probably stronger in some aspects than the laminates. The problem with the laminates is not the glue but the wood used. Sometimes the wood veneer is so poor that it has no strength and the stock will split quite easily. Laminates made of good quality maple as opposed to the common low grade birch are much superior to other laminates and equal at least to good walnut. The strong feature of the laminate is it's resistance to warpage. They will still shrink and swell however and benefit from the same finishing and sealing techniques as walnut. Laminates are a bit heavy. I have toyed with the idea of cutting the action section out of a walnut stock, having it stabilized, then glueing the whole thing back together but this is a project that will likely wait a long time! Regards, Bill.

The use of black walnut over high grade English or some other walnut like Turkish would tend to devalue a pricy double rifle...especially on resale...

Black walnut is somewhat heavy and has large pores, but it does look nice on old Winchesters and period guns...That is pretty much what I regulate it too....

I have seen some Black, and claro wood that would match the best French or Turkish but it is very rare indeed...I have a claro blank on my 6x45 Sako L-461, that is a dark blood red full fiddleback and harder than a whores heart and I'm not sure it had a pore in it, looks like marble. It is a very rare piece of wood picked out by Tony Barnes who was a perfectionist on wood and anything else he got involved in..It is checkered 24 LPI....

Ray,

Got a picture of it? I would really like to see it.

As has been said in several different ways, the black walnut would likely work, but as a percentage of the final product, ie. a finished stock, the wood costs is fairly small unless you are getting into the lofty exhibition areas. You should be able to find a very nice piece of wood for about $300 or less in english. It is unlikely that your particular piece of Black will have the strength or grain pattern(beauty) of a nice English walnut stock. I think you would be money ahead to go this route, particularly if you ever decide to sell the rifle.

The strength and grain pattern of walnut, American black, French, English, Circassian, or what-have-you is determined by the conditions under which it matured. If the tree grew slowly in an arid or semi-arid environment, the quality of the wood will be much better than wood from trees grown "quickly" in warm, wet climates. SOME American black walnut exists which is close-grained, beautiful, and hard to distinguish from Turkish or Circassian-but, this wood is GENERALLY no longer available, having been mostly used up during the 19th Century!! So, for the BEST wood, you usually have to go with an import. I would not use most of the American black walnut I have seen on a double (or any other top-end piece).