doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Reddish colored blanks

Brent, how could you? I mean, here ya go introducing the unwelcome element of good ole common sense into a discussion about aesthetics! Yes, black walnut or juglans nigra has some spectacular figure, but it also has the same exact drawback as the Ruger No 1 action, at least for persons of a particular taste. Both the Ruger action and the highly-figured black walnut are eminently qualified to fulfil any needs of the hunt as well as any desires for artistic appreciation, but....

But unfortunately both are also so inexpensive as to be available to (gasp) almost anyone!

I mean, how is anyone expected to know that I'm a special person if all I can come up with is something any Bubba can buy down at the nearest Wally World? (VBG) Sorry, end of rant, but you get my point. There're also the facts that juglans regia is marginally lighter and stronger for its weight and that eventual age doesn't tend to darken & obscure its figure as much as with juglans nigra and it's easier to fill the pores when finishing and it cuts cleaner and its diamonds are stronger and etc etc.

But mainly juglans regia is more exclusive, a mark of affluence and/or apparent aesthetic appreciation. That other walnut just ain't got the same braggin' rights!
Regards, Joe

Actually, there are some pretty good walnut trees in England and some very fine lumber has been cut there over the years. George Nakashima used some from there and in a issue of Fine Woodworking there was an article on a very fine cabinet made from the figured wood of an English tree cut from the property of a British naval officer,interesting story.Some trees I have cut in Blackhawk county,Iowa showed quite a reddish cast with black streaking. These trees all had one thing in common,they were trees grown where cattle had access and grew with lots of manure around them and I mean lots of manure.The lots around the trees were fenced in and the cattle were concentrated so urine might have been a factor also.

Must be something about Iowa trees. The ones I have cut on my property have also been quite red. Not too highly figured, but quite red. FWIW, Winchester used to get most of its walnut from Iowa and Missouri in the old days. And while some of the redness in an old Win 85 stock is the colored oil they used to finish with, it is also in the wood.

Brent

Strange that this subject comes up ----- I use to buy a lots of blanks from a man (I.D. Johnson) in Strawberry Point , Iowa. They all had a delightful red color with pronunced dark streaks. Small world

Dale and I were friends and he taught me a lot about walnut. His son,Randy,still runs the business in Strawberry Point.I still have some blanks I got from him 25 years ago.

The first rifle I stocked was from a blank of Am. black from Johnson. As for manure affecting the color of walnut, I call bullsh!t on that one!

(And for MP's of the future, it was a .270 on a Polish Radom Mauser action with an angled ebony forend tip and never got checkered. I did all the conversion work to the military action, stocked it from the blank, turned the barrel contour from a blank, fitted and chambered it as my first project at TSJC. I sold it in Springfield, OR (1985?) to get enough money to fly to Vegas and join the ACGG as a muzzleloading gunmaker. When I got there I was the only guy with muzzleloaders, everyone else was showing Mausers!)

I can understand the doubt as to the manure when it comes to coloring walnut. The trees in question were cut by me and sawn into lumber by me and the one tree came from family ground which had been in the family since before WW1. The tree had always been isolated from the rest of the grove by a fence and the slaughter calf was always penned there.We cut 6 other walnuts from the site and they were 30-75 feet from this one tree and none of them had the reddish coloring.The other tree was anothers and I cut it and he said that it had always been fenced off from the rest of the property and there were no nails in it.He kept his slaughter cattle and hogs in the pen with the tree also.He still has 4 trees nearby but isn't ready to let them go so I cannot make any comparisons.
I'm not making any dogmatic statements as I don't know for sure but I do know that you can change the color of lumber in the living tree by the injection of dye and I am wondering if a high concentration of whatever is in manure/urine can have the same effect.I have personally cut and sawn into lumber/blanks 22 walnut trees and I am always amazed at the variety of figure and color.I can also say I have nothing but the utmost respect for the people who do it for a living as it is hard,dirty and expensive work and sometimes the yield is not worth it.

There's a reason nice wood isn't cheap! As you mentioned it can be a lot of work for nothing, so when one comes out with great figure and color it's going to pay for all the culls.
Just got these back from Dave Crossno. I've had the blanks for probably 10 years, and a friend had them before that. Kinda dark as I wetted them for the photo.

Maybe it was the blood from the slaughter calves that turned the wood red?

Vall, is that Oregon wood? It tends to run towards multi-colors.

It has been more than 40 years since I graduated from forestry college, but I was as interested in gun stocks back then as we are now. I paid a lot of attention in tree physiology class. Think about how heartwood differs from sapwood. IIRC, growth (a series of biochemical processes)takes place in the cambium and in the sapwood and metabolic wastes are stored in the cells of heartwood. The figures and coloring that we admire are in reality internally-excreted and internally-stored metabolic wastes.

The tree's growth is controlled by available sunlight, by available water and the nutrients and minerals available in the soil within the range of the roots. That range is generally the same as the area covered by the tree's branches and leaves.

Consider the isolated walnut tree. Animals have been penned for many scores of years in the area surrounding a certain walnut. That walnut's heartwood is more highly figured than walnut from nearby trees of similar age but grown where animals are not confined. The presence of animals is the observable variable. It seems reasonable to assume that the isolated walnut tree had more of some critical mineral compounds available to it during specific times in its life than did the other nearby walnut trees.

If walnut from certain locations in Iowa shows a lot of red with some black streaking, that color pattern can probably be tied to one or a few types of soil in that part of Iowa. The ISU library probably has a room full of detailed analyses of Iowa soils and their chemical properties. Some obscure academician may have studied that particular phenomenon.

The Oregon wood probably comes from alluvial (valley or lowland) soils from west of the Cascades. Many of those soils have a very high component of volcanic material, a very different mix than the Iowa soils. Add to that a very different rainfall pattern and different depositional patterns occur in the heartwood. The Oregon trees are under moisture stress for at least half of each annual growing season. That almost never happens in Iowa. All living things are influenced by their environment.