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.
