Anvil 094: 1903 Springfield Split Personality

in this episode a beautiful boar makes this worth doing hacksaws were used to remove bad wood a duffel cut on a 1903 who knew i am the carbon-based life-form of the king of akra glass ah cosmoline is a four-letter word steam up those dents scrapers make short work of a long task if i'm wearing gloves this stuff is pretty nasty lots of oil hiding in the stock where'd all the mungo this 88 gevare and this 1903 springfield have something in common they both looked like this this one is on its way back large chip of wood has been replaced this thing let's work on this thing and we're going to talk about wood this time the metal on this gun's in great shape so let's get on down the rabbit hole for what amounts to the king of the duffel cuts so on the first piece we're going to cut right back to this line now before you say anything about the fact that i'm cutting this with a hacksaw the reason why i'm cutting with a hacksaw is i want to minimize all that split out that you get i don't care about how fast i don't care about how accurate i've started the cut in front of this absolute line here back here where the band rests here let me contrast that there you go i started to cut up in front because i want to then take rasps and a couple of very very sharp chisels and then go ahead and be able to finish this off plus if i get if i guess this wrong and i migrate over i migrate over on the back side of that somewhere down around the bottom i don't want to have to pay the penalty for that so i'm going to leave myself lots of room for oopsy daisies wow okay here we go now we've got some sawdust for later when we're going to be filling in uh nicks and dents in the wood and it's just nice to have this one collect a little bit more we do the other one okay so we're close here let's take a look at how see i left a little bit of a step so the width of the curve is going to be opening up in opposite directions and we want to leave a little bit too much going that way and a little bit too much going that way and then milk them together until we get the exact length we want on a true duffel cut you do not have that luxury because that little um that extra width that you really want to have on a duffel cut is laying on this piece of paper [Laughter] now i'm going to stop here because when this cut breaks out into the barrel channel this will go and we'll get a huge crack right down here so what i'm going to do is i'm going to roll this over and come at it from the other direction i've collected more than enough sawdust so i'm not really worrying about that anymore give it a good pop there there we go okay and we're just going to slide this up here and sit on that so now we've got a front end that's too long i'm sorry a rear end it's too long and a front end that's too long all right so now we'll start milking off this excess right here till we get back to a nice clean square line and then we'll milk this excess off until we get back to a nice clean square line and then when we plug the two together viola we've got a stock that's exactly the right length [Laughter] i'm at a point right here now where i've grasped down and i'm going to show you a little trick that i got shown a long time ago by a guy that's a whole lot older than i am is we're going to come in and lay the edge of this chisel up against the back of this and just roll it and this will result in a stop cut that as we're going and as this stuff starts flaking off it'll flake off into this stop cut and then it won't get all over we won't ruin everything here so all i'm doing is taking a very sharp chisel laying it up against the edge and just rolling it right down into that corner and then that keeps everything from just flaking off at an inopportune time the whole purpose of doing this of course is to leave one more 03 stock in the gene pool instead of throwing both of these stocks out if you have a fully equipped chop and really honestly the guts to do it let me just go ahead and do that okay so now that we've got that we can come in and aggressively milk some of this off and not worry about these flecks carrying back over things [Laughter] [Laughter] now you would ask why don't we just lay the saw in and make that cut in the first place you don't have that kind of control with that saw you don't a piece of grain grabs it and it takes off i think it's better to just milk your way up on it nice and slow and get exactly what you want and it doesn't really matter if this cut doesn't come out exactly perpendicular to the long axis because the glue's going to take all that up we're going to drill a bunch of holes in it anyway now you see all that flake off right there to that line that's our stop cut right there on the end of my into my fingernail right there that's our stop cut so when that flaked off it didn't hurt [Laughter] we're getting real close and we're getting real close we're right up on our stop cut right here so now we'll attack from this angle with less aggression all right so now we've got this foreign piece it right to the back end of the stop cut so the the locking piece would go in there like that and then the barrel band is going to sit on here like this and we can see now that we're absolutely flush here and that's the way that side should go and then we'll make the other side of this cut ever so slightly shorter so that there's just not enough room in between this end of the barrel lock barrel band lock and the back end the part that it's going to butt up against and then we can just ever so slightly milk this joint open and make this band real tight and that's what we're hunting for so now we're standing we're standing wood to wood let me get the light up in there right there we're standing wood to wood and on the band is tight the barrel's on in there but the band is tight we're in down we got all the distance right and when we're done with this you won't even know we did it unless you get the barrel out of the stock and that's the whole point um we got to drew drill for some reinforcements here so let's get on with that we'll grab a drill motor and we'll drill a pilot hole here so the question becomes where do you put this reinforcement you put it up high so that when you try to bend the stock this way that rod is under tensioned you put it down low let the barrel reinforce the top and this reinforces going up i'm going to split difference drill right in the damn middle because we don't have any cleaning rod here now we broke out into the into the lightning channel down here that's fine that's what we need so then we need to have a ball like a baby it's not like a steel ball there line this up in the front right here across the top and then we're just going to sit down on this and that's going to give us a dent right there and that's going to tell us right there that dent is going to tell us just about where we want to go ahead and drill this next hole we'll just drill this where's the dent uh there it is right there i'll make sure we're close and we're right on the money that was actually a viewer who showed me that little tip i'd never seen that done one of the guys in the comments section said hey why don't you just drop a bb on it and give it a smack well there you go that'll give us a good bite there we'll glue that in but you thread that end and then the other end we're going to overboard just a little bit we'll walk it open a little just fit we want this open down in here we want it open in here because we want this thread to stick out and the glue to kind of hang onto it like a great big rivet there we go see that's going to be perfect right there and there it is man that's that's basically a duffel cut on a 1903 that is not something you get to see every day right so it's sticking out in there and it'll hang on to that and we'll smooth it all over make it look pretty all right so we're all done prepping the ends of this we got our two through holes for a quarter 20 mount these are just dimples that i just shot in and i'll fill those in full of glue and it'll give the bite and give the joint a little bit of torsion there is a glue escape hole right here this is air escape because i want to shove glue down a long axis of this so that that that rod has a complete amount of bite while i was prepping this i wire wheeled that stud down shiny this spacer will maintain the clearance between the barrel and an o3 these all threes have a tremendous amount of clearance inside and basically the barrel touches up here at the end and all the way back at the receiver and there's nothing in the middle so this will keep the entire glue joint from kind of kind of running uphill can't put the nose metal on and with the nose metal on and the rear end of this receiver tacked down this thing is in exactly the right spot and it can't go anywhere and that it will sit until it hardens now we we've got a saddle here that we'll probably cut back out of this because we got a nice clean oil-free joint and we'll we'll come back in and file this saddle out later don't forget your mold release this barrel is double mold release because it's still got the lathe marks on it and boy you get that thing acro glassed hard and you are in a world of hurt do not rub off this squeeze out right here don't rub this out because as long as this hasn't wetted the back wood we'll be able to just knock that out with a chisel all right well while this is setting we got another little issue we got to deal with so let me get some heat on this pig and i'll be right back ah godzilla's however underneath all of this spooge oh gotta love that creamy cosmoline goodness right underneath all of that are two metal clips that are not rusted so how do we go about getting rid of all this well we can scrape it off the old-fashioned way and i'm inclined to do that and you go yeah but what about all of the grease and oil in this cosmoline that is soaked into this wood and i would tell you that this color is damn near the color i'm shooting for you know what we're going to scrub this down maybe hit it with a shot of our carb cleaner and then we're going to have our foreign back and i think we're going to be okay one thing i'm not going to do is shoot a video on how to remove cosmoline because i hate it it's nasty i have the same affection for it that everyone else has well that's better i'm going to admit to having a five gallon jug a lacquer thinner but you don't need a five gallon jug of it to do this this is just lacquer thinner like you get at lowe's and you run it on run it off real quick and it takes that cosmoline right off and it leaves you with a piece of mountable wood and and i'm i'm just telling you this is a circle i think this is military new old stock i have no way to prove it but what i'll tell you is these guns did not come with 320 grit sanded finishes they did not come with eight coats of french polished uh oil on them they came i i'm this is from my research that i'm seeing they were sanded out about this way dipped in a freaking bucket of boiled linseed oil left to drip dry put in a box and mailed and that's about it so you know if you see one of these guns and they're sanded down smooth and you can't see the pores uh you gotta suspect whether or not maybe one of them went over or not um unless it's anything swiss those guys just over finish the crap out of everything anyway i digress one of the best ways to not screw this thing up and prepare it for mounting anagonis to not screw it up so we're not going to hit this with any sandpaper we're not going to do anything we're just going to leave this alone for right now we will make decisions on stain the parent gun is pretty nasty so we're going to probably go with a really dark red and we'll get it all to match because the parent gun has got some issues here i'll show you what i'm talking about there it is right there sitting underneath that lamp and that lamp is actually heating the barrel up in order to be able to set the epoxy a little bit faster so that's cool so we're back here and i get asked i got asked some finished questions about hey the danish oil you use isn't waterproof like tongue oil is i got new news for you there is no such thing as a waterproof finish you might try to be minimizing the ingress of raw water in and out but water comes and goes out of these things and most finishes are like a wet sweat sock and it just lets it come and lets it go makes the wood a little bit harder makes it withstand day-to-day handling but at the end of the day there is no thing as a totally waterproof finish unless you're in one of those west system epoxies that make it look like it's sitting under about a quarter of an inch of water the issue there is the wood then moves and you get all those little cracks like you get on the brownings with all that urethane oil is nice because it can be fixed you can dent it you can fix it if you crazy because you're steaming up dense that's great all right i spared you guys all that cleanup out here when we did the arisaka i showed you the dirty part about doing uh this front thing we drove this barrel band on snapped over and as you can see we had to make a little bit of we made a bit of a fit you can't see it but i came about a sixteenth of an inch back to make up for the fact that i made the stock a little bit shorter to make this joint tight here all right so we're focused up here because what i want to show you is is this is what this freaking handguard looked like when the gun was new and this stock down here here this is where we're at so this is the actual contrast how far gone this stock went while we're here there's one other thing i want to point out this cross bolt you see that pit right there that's not a pit that's a stake this cross bolt has absolutely there's someone telling us we are not taking the cross bolts out of this stock and we're not going to do it i'm not going to drill it we're not going to do squat we'll do our best to clean that up but what we'd like to do is make the stock look like this new old stock handguard by the way a lot of that dirt that you see here let me get this lit right see how beautiful that is watch this i can just take my thumb and rub it on that and it'll turn a full shade darker just from the gack on the end of my thumb so the color of stuff is absolutely i don't know ethereal here a little bit of carb cleaner actually this is brake cleaner not carb cleaner do not use carburetor cleaner use brake cleaner carburetor cleaner has oil in it and i don't want you to use that use brake cleaner if you're going to do it basically it's non-chlorinated brake cleaner is essentially pressurized acetone in the can and you pay for the convenience all right we're going to get this thing in a place where we can work on all this we're going to come in and steam all these dents up and a lot of these are abrasions we're going to do it with the gun put together because i want to maintain a sense of balance don't work here work here work here work here without pulling back you want to work here work over here work over here and get the whole thing in a sense of harmony don't go after one spot then all of a sudden you got a beautiful spot and it's a divot and the firemen across the street can say it holy crap there are some debates about whether or not you steam before you scrape your scrape before you steam i don't know but in this particular case this stuff is so jacked up in here now this almost looks like the gun got dropped on the floor so steaming isn't going to do a whole lot of good in here but we're going to do it anyway only because i want to try for what i can and i don't want to cut down to the bottom of it so again with the monocoat iron and the steam um and i will reiterate here because there will be people watching this video that didn't watch us do a little bit of work on a 98 mauser if you're going to put steam on a stock you have committed to at least partially refinishing it and i want to make sure everybody understands that there's a lot of oil in this stock it uh it smells funny we had some comments and some discussions about killing mold in stocks sodium carbonate arm and hammer makes a beautiful super sudsy product it's not sodium bicarbonate it is not baking soda it's carbonate and that's really really really good at killing mold from what i'm told by a bunch of people that know a lot more about it than i do okay that is starting to lift that a little bit and i'm trying to look up in here in a monitor and see if you can see that starting to come alive there and we'll go after every freaking dent in this stock you can see all the water vapor on the surface there i'm using the edge of this because there's a lot more uh water in the edges and you can aim it better you can sneak up on it and aim it we're getting to the point of diminishing returns here um there's you know there is a limit to what you can lift and we're going to sand down a little bit scrape down actually i'd love to be able to get through this whole stock never pull a piece of sandpaper out and i did it on that 98 stock and i'll do it here i think um um once again one of the real reasons why we're doing all this and we're expending all this effort on this gun is because we um we're really trying to keep this stock in the gene pool okay i moved the camera here because i've got the gun jig right where i want it i got the muzzle trapped in the vise and i've got the butt laying on the bench so it's very stable while i work on this um i have an uh gewehr 88 that's actually mounted on a checkering cradle i have this other thing done to it because i'm trying to make a point here and i was showing devon how to hang on to a how to hang onto a stock and we got the long cradle out that thing's seven feet long okay yeah that one's lifting pretty well guys this steam is hot so be careful where you grab the rag and that's personal experience okay be careful where you grab the rag also remember that this stock this metal is cold and we're actually depositing water vapor on this metal so when we're all done this metals got to come back out of this stock to make sure it just doesn't sit here and turn right back around start rusting again uh there was a discussion about whether or not we're going to re-parkerize this i don't think so because um this particular metal has got to look like it's been in a stock that looks like it's been drugged through a war so you got to make it correct it's got a match okay so we've steamed up most of this now and we're gonna switch over to the uh scrapers here in just a second let's see we got here because i'd like to get a lot of this lifted off the surface and take a look at it okay we'll put that over there so we're gonna take a hot air gun here pardon me while i reach in front oh bump the camera i'm just drying the gratuitous water out of this you don't want to get it too hot because i don't want all the oil to come floating up to the surface we've talked about scrapers in the past how they're sharpened um and how they're employed and how you raise the edge on them go back and review that we had quite quite a thing about it all right let me hang this up okay laughs so this grains kind of run on uphill like this that tells me that the scraper is probably going to be happier cutting this way then it will be cutting this way but it all depends you cut the way the wood likes you it's kind of like petting a cat backwards you got to make sure that you always pet the cat in a way that it doesn't completely object to your attempts one of the things i like about scrapers is let's assume that this cut right here through the stock let's assume that that was a cartouche that that was put in there somebody knocked on the end of this and put that in you'll notice we have not cut that away we've skated right over the top of it scrapers are far more discriminate than not screwing up stampings than sandpaper is and sandpaper even back sandpaper would ride down into this hole and back out again and muddy this whole thing up so now that we've got this we've got this scraped here let's go back in and steam a little bit more so now that we've done that let's go back and really hit this again because we've cut the wood off the top now so now we can really see what we're doing i'm having a sudden urge for a cigar all right that picked that up a lot more we're gonna keep steaming here all right okay all right so as you can see here now we've come to a second level of let me go after this a little bit more and we're almost we're bringing that crack up to the surface so that we did not have to remove all sorts of extraneous crap around and i'm sorry i'm reaching in front hang on a second here okay that dent is damn near all the way gone i mean it doesn't even have any depth now this is damaged so this damage goes down a little bit further than i want to go because we are bumping precipitously up against hang on a minute there's going to be a little shot of air here we are bumping precipitously up against running into this recess here and i don't want to bump down there so we'll probably leave that and continue on and the rest of the stock is going to be scraped steamed scraped bumped up and we're going to try to get this whole gun done without any sandpaper if we can get away with it we've immersed this in lacquer thinner for about well one minute per decade so in this particular case about eight to ten minutes we've immersed this and you can do this without five gallons of lacquer thinner by soaking a rag in that stuff and wrapping the stock in it for a little while 10-20 minutes and then when you take the rag off make sure you put the rag somewhere and let all that volatile stuff pop out of it so we did that and we removed a lot of a lot of the oil in this stock and you can see it's cutting much easier much more freely lacquer thinner and chemicals are not everyone's cup of tea but i will re-emphasize that if you use caustics or you use a petrochemical whatever you use on a stock once you use it you have committed to refinish the whole thing now there are some numbers here and we haven't been able to read them yet we don't know there was a stamp here and this was messed up it's not the serial number of the gun we know that for a fact and we know we don't know if it's a rack number we don't know what it is so i'm trying i'm being really really gentle and i'm not cutting through it but you're not going to be able to read it because this particular stock has been through for grief don't come all the way to the end we don't want to round this off we don't want to get we don't want to roll this out so i'm coming right up to the edge and when we go to do the final finish we'll go ahead and throw the butt plate on this thing and make sure we don't override it but you can see here no sandpaper and that's coming out nice now the numbers that we're trying to avoid are here and here you don't want to steam these numbers or else i mean their impressions you'll pop them up so you don't want to steam the impressions but once you get all that oil and stuff out of the stock it's far easier to go ahead and scrape it that way that dent disappeared everything disappeared here there's some crosswise abrasions that almost look like this thing's been filed on with a rasp i don't know what happened to this thing but i can tell you that this is a lot nicer looking chunk of wood than it was when we started we'll keep going there's a very very large hunk out of the bottom of the stock i'm going to show you how to deal with that in the center of the screen here there's a very large chunk of wood lifted and i've got this kind of crosslit so you can see it right on the umbra there it is there's a dig there's a dig so there it is right across the top you're not going to be able to put that back that's not going to steam out that can however with an extremely sharp chisel just be rolled off like this and just get down below the surface what we don't want to do is create an enormous divot here we just want to cut it off it is what it is so we'll just roll this off right there like that there is some riding right here there's a papa charlie right there i'm trying to avoid digging down into that because those are desirable markings that we would like to leave behind but this can just be rolled off very gently use a slicing action see i'm pushing the blade sideways and then we're going to come in and reverse come from the other side and just knock this stuff off here there we go it's digging okay so that was it we did not have a choice it's sticking up like that we're going to slice it off and now it just looks like a large large divot again we're back to we're back to our basically a single-edged file is what the scraper is and we can come over this papa charlie without losing it you see what i've done now is tighten this up you can see them even better that's as far down as i'm going over these letters but we did get the surface layer among off of it be careful when you're up in here because what you don't want to do is dig this down you don't want to dig down so be very very careful of all your edges just be careful your edges there's um you know anytime you're near the edge of an inlet or something crazy you're going to get into that so there's all of these there's all of these digs everywhere and we just got to kind of go in and cut them off because you're not going to iron them down you're just going to have to just get them off this thing looks like it was drugged behind a kid's bicycle this stock has had a hard way to go i'm just coming in and slicing this ridiculously sharp chisels really help here okay that off like this right there guys it's just like when you're shaving and you're feeling for the whiskers it's right there girls i have no analog for you just if it if it feels rough just cut it off i don't know what else to tell you about that then we're back in with the steam it's a big old cut running right here let's see if we can at least lift some of that cut up to where we can get to it the important point to note here is that all of this takes time and time is money so if you have a lot of time to throw at something you can throw it at this but if you're wondering why your local gunsmith is looking at you like you're a little bit nuts because he wants you to i got this here 75 mil syrup and i was wondering for 50 if you can make it look like it's brand new again not gonna happen guys you're gonna have to do this yourselves okay a little bit more right there you have to do this yourself okay so we lifted that that one's pretty much gone this guy right here that's pretty much gone too we're going to drop a lot of steam right there yeah you see just slowly but surely work your way around the stock and go after all of this nastiness and eventually it'll start looking decent you do not need an industrial grade hot air gun you can use a hair dryer for this and just use a regular old hair dryer you don't have to have i just happen to have that heat gun because i use it for other things now all this will just shave down nice and easy okay a sharp scraper is giving you that real real fine curl right there there you go so we have a rag that's been saturated in lacquer thinner here and we're going to go after this oil up to this barrel band now this lacquer thinner i'm going to tell you what i'm not famous for wearing gloves or doing things and even i'm wearing gloves here because this stuff will make a third hoo-hoo grow out of your forehead however comma it's doing a really really good job of taking years and years of cosmoline out of this plus this stock was uh exposed to some heat and that heat did a pretty good job of cooking that cosmoline into this wood so we'll just give it a good scratch there and we'll let it so so far we're pretty much done in the back back here we're coming around the corner there's a lot of nicks and pops uh most of the things here now have got to be steamed a little bit i've got my steaming iron heating heating up and we'll continue to work our way all the way forward on this and get it pretty well ironed out we are going to take some sandpaper to this particular stock just because i want to talk about sandpaper it doesn't really need it but you know how do you go from this rough um this level of roughness over to something that's smooth but not molested okay we'll do that we're going to come up forward here all right we want to be oh i wanted that upside down now front here again a lot of heat got put on this stock so we just want to get any of the remaining oils off of it for those of you guys just doing one of these rifles at home you have the luxury of time budget about i don't know a week of spare time so if your idea of spare time is two or three days on a two or three hours on a saturday just know it's going to take you about a month to get through one of these don't be in a hurry because they're not making any more of them there's a theory we were bantering about in the shop yesterday about whether or not the lacquer thinner would make it easier to reinflate the wood pores bruno's operative theory and the one i'm going to run with is that by removing the oil the water now has access and can re-inflate the cellulose part of the wood fibers in us and blow this all back up outstanding so bruno and i were playing around with ways to show the inside of a bore and it requires us to pull the focus in and out and there it is and that's what this thing ought to look like shiny to the bottom uh i had to scrub this one a little bit but it wasn't rusted this particular bore had that cosmoline that had been burned looked to it but remember that cosmoline rust pits gilding metal and lead are all bore obstructions as well as the obvious sticking the muzzle in the mud you need to be able to see all the way down your bore you need to keep them clean and you buy the bore on an old gun and we can fix the rest of it if you had just started in on this stock with straight up sandpaper all your sandpaper would have been gunked up it would have been a nasty mess and you would not have made a lot of headway and you would have gone through an enormous amount of sandpaper that's better so that's better when than it was when i started just knocking everything off and not being too aggressive the whole point is to get this whole stock down to about the same state and then get out before anybody knows you were in here we're getting close we've got most of this buffed out and just keep working the stock down until you get all the way down with the scrapers let's talk about sandpaper next because that's a topic that's going to have to come up okay we began with a stock that looked like this this is what this thing looked like and it wound up here and the reason why we took all this time to get everything off is because if you start with this sandpaper right here and you try to sand this off all it's going to do is clog the sandpaper it's just going to clog it it's not going to do anything and you will go through piles of sandpaper attempting to sand this stuff off and it gets all gacked up and then it smears it into the wood you don't want to do that so pretty much the course of sandpaper i use in the shop is a 150 backed with a felt pad you can just hang on to it like this this is going to be good enough for what we're going to do here and we're just going to cut anything that's sticking up down off the surface there's a tendency to over sand these stalks you know people go to 400 500 600 much below about 300 grit all you're doing is polishing this wood you're not really sanding anything and we still have some adherence i'm going to wipe that on my sea we're still we've got some oil in here that's making this stick and we're not going to be able to get below it but boy i'll tell you what this sure beats the heck out of trying to cut all of this nastiness off of this piece of wood with just sand paper and the only way to really get it off the wood with sandpaper is to start in the 40 to 60 grit range and just you know gnarl it all off well why not just use a uh why not use a rasp or a scraper to take it off i think it's easier and uses a lot less materials the difference between an amateur and a pro is that an amateur will expend time to save materials and the pros are expending materials to save time but there is a limit to that okay so we'll sand this and once we get i'm not going to go through this whole stock we're just standing with sanding down one piece one piece of walnut here and we get this wet and this is pretty much what it's going to look like if we use the natural stain we're going to go red this gun's going to look a lot better with a red okay so we have a fairly deep dark piece here let me grab a little bit of light here and you can see what i'm talking about it's fairly dark here because this is where all the oil from this ferrule penetrated and i'm not gonna be able to cut down far enough so we're gonna we're gonna leave that and then if there is a way i can show it you see how this it's almost looks like razor stubble standing up on the ends and that has to be cut off so i've cut that off and you can see the difference between where it stumbled out over here let me come around a corner right there and where i just sanded it off now that we've sanded that off if you get it wet again it'll stand back up so let's go ahead and dryer that and it stood back up but not nearly as bad so we just continue to repeat that cut it off and this you're doing this on the entire stock you're cutting this off like this getting it wet and you keep going until the grain doesn't stand up then you're done now granted we've only done this very small part of the stock but here it's nice and smooth now and it's rough it's rough down here i can't turn that but it's rough kind of yeah just a little bit break that right there good stop tension it up so it's still rough down here where i didn't sand it but it is smooth here and that's what you're trying to get rid of on the entire stock with just a gentle application of water heat it stands up now if you don't want this to happen you would use like alcohol and this is why i'm going to use an alcohol-based stain so we don't get any of this inadvertent stand up where this will really start driving you nuts is when you're checkering and when you're carving which is why religiously sharp tools are always a help once we've got that dryer off we can go down to 220 on this we can get down to a 220 grit but you're almost wasting your time on a military weapon you just don't want any obvious cross grain scratches and the pores don't even have to be filled you just need to get all of the razor stubble off of it all of the standing up grain we're done sanding this and there is a point of diminishing returns there's some damage here to the wood there's a cut we didn't get through here there's a kind of a rough spot here but to get into that is going to leave a pit about the diameter of my fingernail and i don't want to go in there there's a point of diminishing returns on all of these guns because the metal isn't new and it looks like it isn't new so there's a limit even with steaming and cutting and sanding you can see various pieces of sandpaper that i've used that have loaded up full of the oil that's seeping out of this stock and that is after the lacquer thinner steaming scraping treatment there's still a lot of oil in this stock and to get this thing all the way down and make it not look nice and pretty you're not really going to be proving anything to get down that far it just won't look right however i think we pretty much got it from where it was this is the point on a regular gun where if you wanted to fill in all of these pores you wanted to fill in all of this open grain here that's what that card full of sawdust was for right back there the card full of sawdust you'd smear it on the finish as you're as you're sanding in and it helps to fill all the pores it's it's always good to have a little bit of sawdust left over we're not doing that here because it's uh it's lipstick on a pig this is what this is so stains a lot of these earlier 03s the garands had kind of a reddish stain and i'm going to go dark if you want to see what a gun's going to look like blonde just get it wet like i did on that 94 reveal you get it wet that's the color it would be right there if we just put any kind of oil linseed oil or or in my particular case a danish oil um that's the color it would be and that's not nearly dark enough i want to take it down dark enough to hide this entire plethora of issues and the other deal is is that as stock finishes age they get darker our preferred mode of application is going to be a 55 chip brush just go buy these things don't try to save them they're not worth saving i have a a just a stain that i've been using it's an antique walnut stain but they're all spirit stains they're all this is a van der hae formula 13. pick this up from brownells um and in case you were curious here we go so i want just a little bit of red in this and it's going to be this arbitrary here we're just going to put a little bit of the red in there because i'd like a reddish shoe to it and i want this darker than any stain i can get so i'm going to throw a little bit of the dark stuff in it just a little bit now i'm doing two guns with this i've got a gewehr 88 over there that we're working on and the gewehr 88 is going to get the same treatment so i'm going to use the same oil for both stocks and then you don't need a whole lot of this stuff you just need enough of it to get the brush wet and that's it that's going to do this whole gun so we're gonna do the bubble bubble boil and trouble routine here just kind of mix it all up and uh well let me get up here it's uh it's moment of truth time boys and girls oh yeah now don't worry about it getting it on the metal and i left the metal on the gun because i wanted a the structural stability of the whole gun being bolted in one piece and two it made me not sand in areas where wear doesn't occur if you can't get the sandpaper in there your hands didn't get in there so the gun's not flawlessly finished all the way to the bottom but uh yeah that's some good looking stuff we'll keep going on this we'll paint the four end here and see here we'll keep going now you're not this is not a coat you're putting on this is an application meaning we're going to leave it on and let it soak in and keep reapplying in areas where it's soaking in and then we're going to leave it on for about 20 minutes and wipe it off and then let it set for an hour or two and then come back in with another application and keep going until the wood's pretty much done drinking it and then we're going to wax this one i think we're going to wax this stock because it's going to need it for the way it's going to get run and i tell you what i don't think that's looking too bad right there yeah that's looking good so we'll keep going with this i have to re-jig it in device and i'll go but i'm putting it on with a paintbrush you guys have seen me dab sink dab things out with my fingers and when i'm doing small applications yeah but when you do the whole thing and then overnight you take this lid and you just you just cut a notch in the lid like this sorry and then like that and then overnight you can cap this bucket like this and that brush and that oil will keep for several days and allow you to keep coming back in here applying more if you wish go go go on a military weapon you only had basically one pass of this stuff maybe two now i'm wiping it down prematurely but i'm going to show you what's going to happen here when you wipe it down the areas that had never had any finish on them at all are kind of flat there we go these are kind of flat this down here is going to have a little bit more sheen to it because the wood has had oil oxidized in it before but this is essentially what you're after i'm going to go ahead and goop this back down this is kind of what we've gone through we started here we progressed to here and now we're at a place that has final finish on it there's a coat of oil setting up on this and when i'm all done we'll wind up waxing this thing you can still see uh imprints and insignias anywhere that there was any kind of information in this in this stock we have it we've taken most of the scrote off we've gotten the big lines steamed up that was a deep one i couldn't go in and get that without a huge dip we left the crossbolts alone because they weren't eking rust the metal is decent and there's still a few parts missing to this we can't shoot it today because right now the constraints of shooting this video says here it sits with a coat of oil on it that needs to set for another couple hours and then it's got to get waxed and then it's got to get put back together again and we're out of time so i've got to end this video here but you know just to summarize what we covered was how to begin by scraping filing raising dents by steaming carting using scrapers and then finally cutting through to sandpapers and finishes where we oiled it down stains that i like to use and then we were into waxes which is just going to be hot air gun toilet bowl ring all the way down this thing and it'll be done and it'll look right and we started out with a front end off of one a rear end off another and we wound up with a complete gun for complete disclosure the unit that used to belong to this rear end failed its hardness test and the barrel was bent he was gone it was done so we didn't we we had two rifles one of them is dequeued and out of the gene pool and we took a good piece of its stock and kept this one in the gene pool and that's about the best we can get and it's always been a pleasure to help you guys out you can do this do the maintenance carbon based life forms signing off [Music]

Channel: Mark Novak

Views: 281,108

Keywords: #anvilgunsmithing, @anvilgunsmithing, Mark Novak, Anvil, Gunsmithing

Id: bciG2Tq7Hgs

Length: 61min 47sec (3707 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 05 2021