Yes, I appreciate the warnings about too much red stuff and the benefit of oil and stain/dye mixed for initial applications. I effectively did that by accident on purpose with my last project and got---for me---a beautiful end result. I say accident on purpose because I redid the wood so many times and experimented along the way, thus, in hindsight, actually did the stain/oil mixture.

I have an old steven's favorite that my father had found buried in the foundation of our garage. It looked like a rusted rod when he dug it up. I redid the thing years ago (the first time when I was 14 right after he passed away). I will never ever sell the gun and it's collector value has long since been destroyed. But the grain of the wood is SO coarse and it has some gouges from being knocked around for 30 years. I opened my gun cabinet the other night and said----hmmmmm, I think when I redo the 870 stock I am going to redo this one, too. Filling the VERY coarse grain is a major ietm and I agree with what the others said that in the process of staining and sometimes sanding between layers the result is a filling of the open coarse grain. I intend to find out moe about this since this stock will verify the procedures... As some of you may have guessed I do plan on going with Behlen Blood Red and Alkanet in solvent on these stocks... with oil blended in(!) ...And, indeed, I will try NOT to go too red. But I guarantee they will NOT be dark brown

http://www.icm.cc
transforming ideas into reality