Got to wondering about this after ogling a stock in the classifieds and realized I could not recall seeing a finely checkered maple stock.

I've seen a few and can see no reason why Maple wouldn't checker well. Having said that it is wood and each "stick" is different. Some walnut can be a real pain to checker too. --- John303.

Maple is usually/always tighter grained than black walnut so does checker well. You don't see it much on modern rifles; walnut is favored, but it is used almost exclusively on flintlock long rifles. We use either hard or soft maple for those, which is to say, sugar or red. Both are hard; harder than walnut. Built many of them.

There are at least two species of maple, one of which is every bit as dense and "good" as DCPD reports. The other, I have been informed, is significantly less satisfactory. Unfortunately, I cannot put Latin taxonomy names to either species.

Parenthetically, regarding problem woods, the one that comes to mind as being more difficult to finely (18 lpi and finer) checker is birch. Having typed that, you are probably aware that nearly all budget-priced laminated stocks are made of birch plies. And 16 lpi checkering occurs on them routinely. It looks good and functions better than ultrafine line checkering.

Hope this helps.

Bill,

The last time I was at Cecil Freddis in Las Vegas, he had a nice selection of maple. Nice guy to deal with.

Ed

quote:

The last time I was at Cecil Freddis in Las Vegas, he had a nice selection of maple. Nice guy to deal with

does this look like maple checkers well?

Now THAT is a distinctive iron- history/description?

There are at least 12 maple species in North America. I am only talking about Sugar or Red maple; (Acer Saccharum and Acer Rubrum). West coast maples and silver maple, commonly planted as ornamentals, are very soft. Not bad that I remembered those Latin names from majoring in Forestry 40 years ago!

the problem with some maples is that you run into hard/soft spots. this ends up making basketweave checkering the most logical. the little martini cadet above is such a piece. it remains the wildest piece of maple i ever saw. tin can - it's a 17 ackley hornet. mostly i have found that birdseye tends to me much more uniform than does the wilder types. the top rifle is one of hal hartleys from 1958 and is checkered in 32 LPI

I have checkered 3 bird's eye maple stocks. Each presented a different challenge. One common theme in all was "fuzzing" around some of the "eyes". The solution I used was to paint the area already checkered with clear lacquer (dries fast) and recut to smooth out the "fuzzies"

Maples are put into two groups ,Hard and Soft. Sugar maple is in the hard group. Big leaf maple which has some fantastic grain patterns is however a soft maple.
Carving bird's eye can be a challenge but can lead to cursing !Use extremely sharp tools.

I posted a reply, but removed it as the pictures didn't load up correctly.

I have used maple for some of the early day stocks. The shell flame maple is the hardest to checker and will fuzz up bad. It needs to be sealed while cutting the pattern and go over extra passes to make it look reasonable.

The pictures below are my 17 Rem on mini Mauser action. The blank came from Lou Mrace who tought me stockmaking in 1961. It was 22 lines and could have been cut to 28 lines as it was a hard blank.









I engraved and inlayed the gold also. I have more examples of maple if you want to see more.

That's not fair Les, The talent you posess as a stockmaker should be enough but to be able to checker, engrave, and gold inly is too much for me to comprehend. Could you explain the technique for the gold inlay please? With a couple of pictures if its not too much trouble.

I have a piece of very uniform fiddleback maple to make a stock for my wife's 243. Just a Remington action so not too difficult. Seeing yours is inspiration for me to get going. DW

DW,

I worked as a general gunsmith and only had time to do a few other things. Probably about 2 stocks a yr, but put that over 40 yrs and save pictures along the way for my own scrap book. The shop where I spent most of my yrs believed it was more important to go out front and talk to customers. I could spend an hour talking and maybe sell a $3000 rifle or shotgun. After selling I would return to the shop and maybe take up checkering again. I always had more work than I could do.

I was told by a couple of instructors at TSJC that I was the only person that the school ever had that could probably get into both the Stockmaker and Engravers guild. If they had an Old Farts Guild I might could get voted in. Ha Ha I have been to only one Guild show about 25 yrs ago. I could not justified the cost of taking off work and spending $2000 or $3000. Now it is closer than ever to me and I don't know if I can make it because of health problems.

I taught myself to do basic engraving to make a screw or touch up a pattern on refinishing an old shotgun. The trick on engraving is to understand how the tools have to be sharpened. Gold inlays are done by cutting straight lines and then under cut the sides so the gold will have an edge to be forced into. 24 Kt gold is soft and expensive so you need to know the size of wire it takes to fill the space. That's the short side inlays..,\\\

Sam Alfano has a site up that has more instructions on engraving. If you sign up you can view pictures and get lots of info. It is free to join. www.engraverscafe.com Check out his page and you will be surprise have easy it is to get started.

Back to the maple stocks!!! I will post up pictues of basket carving on maple and you can see how it looks if you apply a oil base artist paints in the pattern. Maple needs to be stained darker to show the grain of the stock. You can see the contrast between bring out the whole stock. This stock was made in 1983. How styles have changed for todays stocks.

That basket weave is really beautiful stuff. I've got to get back to that.