i have a pre-64 mod. 70 i'm refinishing for my dad, but the stock is soaked with gun oil. the PO stored the gun in a case under the bed for a hundred years with lots of oil soaking in on the inside. it has leached out and the some of the exterior is "wet" now, too. i am having a seperate stock cut by roger biesen, but want to make sure i can restore the stocker (no pun intended), also.

how do i get the gun oil out of the stock for refinishing? i plan on an oil finish... am about half way there if gun oil works!

Try a caustic Oven Cleaner. On an M17 stock that was soaked with oil in parts, I hung the stock up, (with face mask and gloves) sprayed it down, waited 20mins, hosed it off, let the stock sit in the car on a warm day to dry ... the repeated the process. Seemed to work.
Cheers...
Con

Get some whiting from Brownells or some diatomaceous Earth and mix it with acetone or toluene or MEK... and apply it to the stock. Remove and repeat as necessary. You'll see when the oil is drawn into the paste as it gets a nasty brown tinge to it.

i thought i'd heard diatemaceous earth before... my wife uses it at school in her classroom for erosion lessons.... how much do you think a stock would take? maybe i won't have to buy any...

724wd,
You can find DE at a swimming pool maintenance company or supply house. Hopefully they have a bag opened as it comes in bags around 50# or so. You don't need much over a pound or two. You can get it from Brownells as whiting but they want $6 for one pound and that is about 30% of the 50# bag price.

I've had pretty good luck using white chalk and acetone. The white chalk is the powdered stuff, carpenters use in their chalk lines. Should be able to find it at a decent hardware store and it is cheap.
Greg

Here in Houston a 25# bag of DE is $19.99. The couple times I needed it I was lucky I had a pool. You should only need a pound or two.

I have had good luck usibg berrymans 5-12 automotive carb and choke cleaner. I got the tip from an old time gunsmith friend of mine and it works. It comes in liquid or spray form.

The oil is in the wood, like water in a sponge. You can clean the surface but it will never come out of the interior. It will migrate back to the surface over time. Live with it or get a new stock.

If you like to play around here is a way to get some out. Heat the wood over an electric stove burner. Do not burn it, just make it very hot. The oil will boil to the surface. Whipe it off with a paper towel. Repeat the steps may times.

I've been working on an oil soaked Martini Henry stock. This summer I've betting setting it out in the sun for hours at a time on my back porch. Within a half hour oil seeps to the surface and I wipe it off with paper towels, then roll it over to expose the other side to the sun. Now after about 10 such sessions the oil seepage is easing up considerably.

Con is right, oven cleaner works wonders. Bad oil soaking requires multiple applications, but it does work.

Lots of milsurp buffs favor the method of packing it in a plastic garbage bag full of kitty litter and leaving it inside a car parked out in the summer sun, the hotter the better. Won't break down the wood or alter the color as the caustic soda in the oven cleaner can. (Some walnut will turn a greenish black, about the color of stool when you take iron pills. Really nasty. I have an M24/47 that did that, and the only fix was to use a dark wood stain on it.)

Husky has used a method of boiling the stock in an ammonia solution. He´s hunting right now but I saw the result once and it was very clean and dry, no miscoloring. PM him for the exact method.