Although obvious, this question is more specific. A Walnut stock blank comes from the ball of the tree and is almost entirely underground during its living life. The base of the Walnut tree is used as it is denser as a result of the trunk's weight compressing the base.
The left and centre picture below show a Turkish Walnut tree before excavation on a hillside in Turkey, this tree is already dead and is a good example of the work required to attain the blank. The image on the right shows Boxall and Edmiston's Turkish Walnut supplier Yusuf with the excavated tree. Once cut the ends of the blank have wax applied to prevent moisture escaping too quickly which can cause the wood to split or crack.
The Walnut is cut in a similar way to an orange's segments. Each piece ideally has straight grain from the trunk running through what will become the neck of the stock as this is the strongest figuring. The primary figure, if any, needs to be in the buttstock area, where the mass offers plenty of strength. As a matter of function, then, grain is really the most important.
The figure is adornment only, but we Americans do love beautiful wood. While English walnut is considered stronger than American black walnut, and probably is, provided you have straight grain through the primary stress areas and the stock is properly inletted and bedded, black walnut is plenty strong enough for all sporting firearms, perhaps with the exception of large-caliber rifles with extreme recoil.
So, in choosing a gunstock blank, you simply must look for straight grain through the primary stress areas. Stockmakers will take a blank — really just a rectangular rough-sawn plank — and draw out the approximate dimensions of a finished stock.
Good gun stock wood simply must keep the grain straight until the butt opens out behind the pistol grip. The opportunity to actually pick out a wooden gun stock blank is rare, part of the process only available to a few top-end custom rifle makers.
This exquisite Winchester was a full restoration by Turnbull Manufacturing Co. A lot of great stocks have little or no figure at all, but it is essential to keep almost all the figure in the butt. It can be spectacular, with feathering, whorls and amazing striping, but the fancier the figure, the more expensive the blank will be. Keep in mind that figure adds nothing utilitarian to wooden gun stocks. A given tree will produce a lot more straight-grained blanks than blanks with fancy figure.
The fancier the figure, the rarer the blank and the costlier it becomes. It's important to understand that making a wooden gunstock isn't just a matter of sawing a linear plank out of a tree and going to work. The blank must be cured, or dried, and this is a lengthy process. The two methods are air drying and kiln drying. How long it takes depends on temperature, humidity and when the tree was harvested which relates to moisture content in the wood. If the wood is air dried, it could well take years; some woodworkers suggest a year for each inch of thickness as a rule of thumb, but, again, that depends on local conditions.
Major suppliers and manufacturers use kilns for drying, which greatly speeds the process, but it still takes time, and of course a proper kiln is a major investment. Either way, the time, labor and facilities involved in the drying process are part of what makes a ready-to-work wooden gun stock blanks costly.
Certainly with factory firearms, we usually accept wooden gun stocks that come on the gun. Most are plain, but once in a while, you see one wearing a fair amount of figure. If you run across one of these that speaks to you, grab it.
Give a Gift Subscriber Services. See All Other Magazines. See All Special Interest Magazines. All Guns and Ammo subscribers now have digital access to their magazine content. This means you have the option to read your magazine on most popular phones and tablets. His reputation has built him an impressive international clientele, most of whom value two things over all else — fit and aesthetics.
We only work with Turkish walnut, which is the very best. Manuel deals in relatively small quantities of walnut for a select few. It sources and manufactures stocks for the entire Beretta group, the majority of which are walnut. At any one time it has an inventory of , blanks sitting in environmentally controlled storage awaiting manufacture. Every gun from the humble Silver Pigeon and up is fitted, or can be fitted, with a walnut stock.
Walnut is by far the most popular choice of material across most product ranges. After a walnut tree has been felled, any wood suitable for making stocks is cut into roughly trapezoid-shaped chunks of timber called blanks.
Inspecting a blank to predict the appearance of a finished stock takes experience and skill but there are some obvious things to look for. So here and on the grip we want the grain to be as straight as possible for strength.
Finding blanks with these characteristics is becoming increasingly difficult. At the more reasonable end of the market, you find guns with straight-grained stocks with barely a flourish in sight. Some gun fanciers like the feather patterns in black walnut, but there are other patterns such as burled or fiddle that are also available.
Myrtle is also used for gun stocks, although less often than walnut. It is a wood commonly found in Southwest Oregon and Northwestern California. Myrtle is a slow-growing tree that has a variety of beautiful wood patterns, including tiger, spalted, fiddleback and burl.
The color of myrtle ranges from blonde to black. Red maple and sugar maple are both popular for gun stocks. Although red maple is known as "soft" maple by some, it is just as hard as black walnut.
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