doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DIY Gunsmithing @ doublegunshop.com Bleaching a stock

Cornstarch works as well. Heating the spot with a heat gun, keeping it moving, until the oil just begins to bubble, then smearing it with cornstarch and wiping it off. This can be a long process, requiring many repetitions

The stock is not oily, either from finish oil or from over zealous use of the oil can on the action. I did wash the head of the stock in acetone to remove any oil and that worked well. The odd thing about this stock is when all the finish was removed the wood is actually quite light coloured, but the second a coat of oil is rubbed in it blackens down again.

You might try a coat of clear sealer followed by oil.

What particular oil finish are you applying? Several years ago, I did a little experiment to see what glues would give me the most invisible repair joint in walnut. I cut and planed some small blocks of walnut and glued them using various glues and clear epoxies. Afterwards, I sanded the glued joints and applied various finishes to see how detectable the different glue joints were. (Titebond Type II was the winner) I used perhaps 8 or 10 different finishes including Tru-Oil, Linspeed, Watco Danish Oil, Clear Polyurethane, Minwax Oil Modified Poly, Sherwin Williams Spar Varnish, Tung Oil, Laurel Mountain Permalyn, Deft, and a couple others. I was struck by how much color difference these various finishes imparted to the walnut without the use of any stain whatsoever. I learned that it is very important to try your intended finish and/or stains on a piece of scrap that closely matches the wood you are going to finish. Otherwise, you may end up doing things over.

cpa's comment about using a clear sealer reminds me of the wood conditioners made by Benjamin Moore, Minwax, et al, that are meant to control the absorption of stain into wood, especially porous species. One of them might control the penetration of your desired oil finish.

Plain old linseed oil, i just applied it to see the colour and was astonished by how dark the wood went.

The so-called drying oils are more likely to produce a dark finish without the addition of any stains or tints. Plain old linseed, as you are using, is probably the worst in that regard, followed by Boiled Linseed Oil. BLO is not quite as bad as plain raw linseed oil because it is somewhat thicker due to the refining, and does not penetrate quite as deeply. Another characteristic of linseed oil is it's tendency to darken with age. With lighter pieces of walnut, these characteristics are exactly what some folks want. But with a piece of inherently dark walnut such as you have, you will end up even darker, and with grain that is obscured rather than enhanced.

Given the precautions and possible problems that others have described with different wood bleaching processes, I think I'd just use another type of finish for this particular gun. Some may think it heretical, but there are a lot of finishes that are much better than linseed oil on a gun stock.

Seeing that we are into heresy!!! You could try clear acrylic varnish 20% cut with water put on with a rag. This will have very little effect on the wood's natural colour, and darken it very little. I know I should bite into the cyanide capsule now! But any port in a storm is a perfect port.

I had considered using danish oil as its easily available, and dries relatively quickly. Another issue is the stock has a gold oval behind the top tang. Does the bleach attack gold. I don't really want to go through the trouble of removing it if i don't need to.

After reading your idea of using Danish Oil as an alternative to Linseed Oil, I took a look at some of those walnut blocks I glued and finished several years ago to see how my Watco Danish Oil fared. It was actually right in the middle of the pack as far as darkening the wood. Other brands of Danish Oil might give a different result. The very least darkening was finished with Zar semi-gloss Polyurethane, and a very close second in light coloration was done with Gillespie Tung Oil. Neither the Tung Oil or the Watco Danish Oil gave any significant surface build, but I only applied a couple coats for my little experiment. Tung Oil is slower to harden than many finishes, and needs a light sanding between coats, but no worse than BLO for curing time. The Laurel Mountain Permalyn and Minwax Oil Modified Urethane were very close in coloration to the Watco Daish Oil, but had much more gloss and surface build. The darkest coloration I got in walnut was with the Sherwin Williams Spar Varnish which was very close to Tru-Oil. But I didn't even try Raw or Boiled Linseed Oils because I feel they are inferior gun stock finishes. A few other finishes I tried were lost during my destructive testing of my glue joints. As a caution, some brands of Tung Oil are not 100% Tung Oil, but actually mixtures of Tung, Varnish, and Mineral Spirits. As always, it is best to try any finish out on a piece of scrap walnut that is similar in color and density before doing your stock.

If you use 'wood bleach' aka oxalic acid to lighten and even out the wood color, it won't effect the gold initial oval at all. No matter what the karat of gold or if it's even just brass it won't do anything to it,,silver the same. It usually cleans the surface of some tarnish, but that's about it.

'Savogran' is the most common off the shelf oxalic acid wood bleach in crystal form avail at DIY stores like HomeDepot, ect. But there are others from the different wood finishing product makers.
Stay away from laundry bleach use on the wood IMO.