Originally posted by Crazyhorseconsulting:
quote:
When I was in gunsmith school in the 50's maple was the lesser expensive of the two primary stock woods,walnut and maple. At that time as I remember they had three distinct types,birdseye,curly and striped. I built a couple of stocks,one curly and one birdseye. The curly was really hard to scrape in the barrel channel as it tended to be soft between the curls and came out wavy. Made a special barrel rasp to cut the channel if I remember. The birdseye worked real nice but some people complained that the eyes had a tendency to pop out sometimes. Never happened to me. I rather liked curly as it was kinda white and grey and not the honey color of birdseye. Nice stockwoods. They invented a laminated blank at TSJC using alternate laminations of walnut and maple that made a really distinctive stock that I liked very much. Similar to the one Remingtom makes today. One of the popular stock treatment of that time was to carve rather than checker a stock. I became fairly adept at carving an oak leaf pattern and maple was a particularly good wood for this treatment as were the laminates.
Earlier in my career I worked a couple of years at a place building muzzle loading rifles, your comments about the curly maple and the soft areas between the curls brings back lots of memories.
As much as I would like to have one of my rifles stocked with a piece of wood like the one that is the topic of this discussion, I think the prettiest rifles I have ever seen using tiger stripe maple especially are half stock Hawkens.
