Rather than take over the thread on how to seal old doubles when restocking or refinishing, I've wondered for many years why the careful makers of fine old double guns didn't seal the insides of the wood at all where they were inlet to the stock or under the fore end iron, or at the end of the butt stock.

Maybe the really best guns did seal the hidden parts of the wood, but I've never seen an original old double gun, ever have any sealant or finish on the hidden insides of the wood, that I've ever taken apart.


Was it merely economy of manufacture?

Or was there some arguable reason they didn't?

Any information or opinions on this would be much appreciated.

I don't know why old doubles were not sealed inside, or were they ? Or some of them with something not now so apparent.
I have a book in front of me called The Shotgun Stock, design construction & embellishment. Author= Robert Arthur. Printed in 1971.
Page 153 Chapter 20, under the heading Gunstock Finishes, I read this.

"The next step is sealing, the sufficient application of some moisture resisting agent to all surfaces of the stock, both inside & out. The finish itself, as well as the sealer, should be as waterproof as possible."
O.M

With all respect, by 1971 the only American doubles made were the Model 21 Winchester and the Stevens 311, and maybe the reissue of the L.C. Smith. I've never had any Model 21's apart, but every one of my pre 1913 L.C. Smiths and all the 311's had no sealant whatever under the lock plates, in front of the butt plate, or under the forend iron, that I could see, anyway.

By 1971 they had super glue to seal the stocks, and polyurethanes, even Tru Oil and Linspeed.

Even my modern Citori and Beretta over and unders, have no sealant in the hidden parts of the wood, nor does my BSS or any other modern double I've owned.

I'm not saying no factory double gun was ever sealed under the visible parts of the wood, but I've had a bunch apart and never seen any trace of sealant or finish of any kind there.

By 1971 the custom stock makers were sealing the insides of the wood, but even then, I don't think the factories were as a usual practice.

Why?

The only rational reason I can think of is that time has always been money, and since the customer wouldn't take the gun apart before he bought it, they left anything he couldn't see unfinished and unsealed.

But then again, when Parker and Fox and Ithaca and L.C. Smith were all head to head competing in the market place, you'd think one of them would have dabbed just a couple of coats of their finish on the inside of the wood, then advertised it.

So maybe, they thought the wood needed to breath inside?

It's always fascinated me, every time I've taken some old gun apart.

Could be the makers all knew that their guns needed some kind of permeable wood surface to soak up the gallons of oil it's future owners would slather onto/into every metal surface?...Geo

992B,
Out of curiosity I pulled the butt plates off a couple of my modern Merkels, sure enough no finish of any kind. I wonder why as well.
Karl

The only reasonable conclusion considering the pervasive evidence. That and the "Why Bother" factor of course

It's cheaper not to do it. Plain and simple.

Don't assign a higher motive when a lower one explains the situation.

Possibly they were

Thanks to M D Christian for the following:
"This was submitted to Handloader Magazine, Jul/Aug 1970 by Harvey A Donaldson who said it was told to him by Frank Lefever, son of D.M. Lefever. He stated this was the method used in finishing stocks by Dan Lefever and other U.S. gunmakers and gunsmiths including Billinghurst, Brockway, Morgan James, and A.O. Zischang."

1. Place the stock in a sheet iron tank with enough linseed oil to cover stock. Stock was left for a day or so depending upon density of the walnut, a harder denser grain wood requiring longer than a more porous grain wood. Next was to remove the stock & stand to drain & leave for several days at least. Very Important: let stock dry completely; this first coat must be completely oxidized by the air before proceeding.

The rest of the process is about 2/3 down here under "Maintenance and Restoration"
http://lcsca.clubexpress.com/content.aspx?page_id=274&club_id=43784&sl=858381813

I can only speak for the gunmakers pre WW1:
I think we are looking through the lens of people who are interested in preserving these guns for eternity.
This was not the gun makers aim in the C19th and early C20th: they needed re-orders and repairs to keep their men working, restocking and re-barrelling were not just a service to their clients, they were good earners.
We see the effect of 100+ years of oil soaking, they really didn't intend the stocks to go beyond the use of a single user/owner, perhaps 50 years, more likely replaced or 'handed down' by 10-25.
Getting a really special gun restocked or rebarrelled was not a big deal financially. Most of the owners of quality guns were wealthy, some very wealthy, and labour was cheap.
You only need to look at the significant number of modest boxlocks that have been rebarrelled to see the effect.
I suspect that the number of guns that we assume to have 'original' stocks is far smaller than generally thought.

I don't put finish on the "Pet and pest" side.

As in, the only thing that will ever see it is either a pet or a pest.

It also might be the reason the inside of the wood was left unfinished, was that nobody had ever finished the wood on the inside. It just wasn't done, and that was the traditional way.

Gunmakers were, and are, conservative. How long did it take recoil pads to become standard equipment on cheaper guns? They still don't come on the finest guns.

My father planted oats on a certain patch of twenty acres. He owned a threshing machine, and a binder, and every spring he'd plant that field to oats, and when the oats were ready to harvest, the entire community came over and the men cut the oats and bound them, hauled them to the thresher, threshed the oats, and trucks hauled the oats to town where they were sold for nearly nothing. Every other crop my father planted, he had ground up for feeding his hogs and cattle, except the oats.


I asked my father why he planted oats on that twenty acres.

He thought a minute, and said that the family used to need those oats to feed the horses, years ago.

But even though we hadn't used horses since World War Two, he said we'd always planted oats there, and he didn't see any need to stop planting oats there, because it was the oat field.

Maybe the same reasoning left the insides of the wood unfinished.

Planned obsolesence as a theory for lack of interior stock finish is ridiculous.

Why anyone has to ask questions that simply will never be answered by someones theories a hundred or two years later brings out these foolish speculations. There is this kind of drivel in Burrard's writings and he could have actually asked someone!

Surely anyone who hand made a sidelock to the best quality he knew how, with many generations passing their best knowledge and experience of creating quality was Not advance planning for the stock to fail.

Stating, "the number of guns that we assume to have 'original' stocks is far smaller than generally thought." Is pure speculation from someone who should know better.

These unanswerable questions mainly come down to, "they just didn't consider it important".

992B, that is probably about the best explanation anyone's going to come up with. After all, aren't we all usually most comfortable with the status quo rather than change?

Most furniture is finished only on the outside exposed surfaces. Open up a chest of drawers made 100 years ago or 200 years ago and clearly there was no finished used on the inside surfaces. It seems finish is only needed on surfaces exposed to the elements.

Maybe, stock makers and furniture makers of a hundred years ago didn't ever worry about having to use questionable wood. There was always an endless supply of stable old growth hard woods. I think light sealers such as shellac was probably used here and there, but if stocks weren't holding up, they probably would've figured out why and fixed it. Maybe, the process wasn't broken.

Wood can absorb and emit water vapor. Perhaps the makers didn't have kiln dried wood and further felt that wood should breathe. Leaving the interior unsealed could be considered an aid to longevity?

Perhaps the stock maker feared that the finish available at the time, would flake off and foul the locks?
Natural wood, sealed by the lock plate would be enough protection?

The sealing of wood on the inside was not done because it was not needed.

Pause and consider the world of about 1900, those guns and furniture and other finished wood articles were born to.

The Morgans and the Vanderbilts, didn't have air conditioning, and had no way to regulate the humidity in their homes in the summer. The wealthiest people with electricity might have had a small electric fan. In the winter, wood and coal heat sapped the humidity out of the indoor air. Gun safes, were closets. Closets, often were pieces of furniture called wardrobes.

Guns were transported to the fields and trap arenas in carriages, buggies, on horseback, and on railroad cars. The best express cars were heated, but none were cooled or humidity regulated.

If there ever was a need to seal wood on the inside of furniture and gun stocks to the elements, our great great grandfathers had a reason to do it. The biggest difference between where the furniture and the guns slept and the outside was there was no rain, snow, or bitter cold inside homes.

Maybe, it was such a losing battle they didn't make the attempt. Super glue and polyurethanes were way in the future, and mostly they had boiled linseed oil, shellac, lacquer, and varnish, to finish the outsides of the wood. Those weren't really true sealers against the elements, even had they finished the inside of the wood.

And also consider the care that had to be given to any firearm that survived in decent shape for us to own. All ammo was corrosive. Synthetic gun oils didn't exist. When a gun got wet, it had to be taken apart and inside from the wet, and dried out and oiled, or it became a rusted mess.

Even forty years ago, well into the WD 40 era, when I was away at college for even a month or so, rust might start to bloom on the metal parts of my guns hanging in a farm house with no air conditioning, and wood heat in the winter.

So not only did it save labor and money to leave the insides of the wood products unfinished, and it was the traditional way to do it, even if our ancestors had tried to seal the insides, they didn't have the ability then, to even seal the outsides of the wood. The finish, was just that, a finish given to the walnut, pretty to look at, and not anymore proof to the elements than the owners.

Bubba does get into guns here and there, but I'm not so sure antique guns are so delicate. I believe a careful and qualified takedown cleaning was the rare exception rather than the rule for surviving antique and other classic sporting arms. When it comes to labor and money, I believe this was an era of small shops hammering out rough damascus stock that require multiple more labor intensive steps to become barrels. Then, the gunmaker was just getting started with a pile of rough materials. Most engraving was trade work. It could be a consideration that the relative cost of labor was nowhere near as significant as it is today.

Best guns were a definite classification cut above, but compared to what's demanded today, fit and finish of classic guns is often expedient. Wood swelling, shrinkage and slight gaps around inletting seems to have been understood and accepted by customers. Very poor grain in the wrist of many modern best guns seems to be a modern demand of some modern concepts of aesthetics, and likely not what a trade worker might have done a hundred plus years ago.

New growth clear cut stumps rot away relatively quickly. Old growth logs can sit in a river for a hundred and fifty years, get drug out by a good old boy, and sawn into pristine stock that sells for a multi times premium over standard hardwood stock. I'm not saying I mind at all that someone decides to use modern sealers on the head of their stock, but if I can spot signs of it, that sends up red flags in my mind about why it was done and what else was fiddled with.

Don't write these products off as ineffective just because they are not high-tech. There are thousands of gunstocks that have survived many decades use and still have the surviving original finishes. They seal against the elements pretty darned good, I'd say, when properly applied.

As long as we desire beauty in a gunstock we will put up with the vagaries and "drawbacks" of wood. It's a trade off, one that I'm willing to make. There are millions of synthetic stocked guns for the buying, if one wants stocks that are trouble free, and basically maintenance free. I will continue to use my shellac to seal new inletting. It seems to last just fine, to me. I have one M/L rifle that was built by a dear departed friend in the 1950s. It's lock inlet was sealed with shellac, and I pulled the lock recently and it looked just fine. No signs of flaking or deterioration. The last m/l I built was about 1995, and it looks like new inside the lock inlet, with no deterioration of the sealing shellac. And, for the record, these m/l rifles are not kept in a climate controlled environment. No heat, no a/c, no humidity control. They don't get rained on, but that's about it.

Twenty three years after sealing with shellac......



SRH

That told me!

Perhaps it has something to do with the type of gun and intent of its use. In the 90's I was designing and having built benchrest standard varmint rifles with wooden stocks (good synthetic stocks were still in the future). The importance of controlling the harmonics of the action and barrel were just beginning to be understood and with it came glass bedding, pillar bedding, aluminum blocks and as part of the accurizing process, sealing the wood to prevent any swelling or warping. That included the inside of the action, barrel channel and under the butt plate along with all other exposed parts.


A 100 years ago shotguns, as they are today, are not accurate instruments and I expect it was more important to allow the wood to breath in the various conditions it was exposed to to prevent it from over drying or rotting and resultant splits and cracks.