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Oiling and rubbing my wood....


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Boring, boring Sunday! Colder than a well diggers ass outside. Ice. Snow. Yuck! So, what to do to keep myself occupied for a little while?

 

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Decided to dip my M1 furniture in boiled linseed oil. Haven't done this since I bought the gun, and it's been shot quite a bit and handled by many, many hands. I generally do this every six months or so anyway. Just let it soak some, then drip hang. Wipe it down with a rag, and then clean out all the nooks and crannies, screw holes, etcetera, with Q-tips so oil don't leak out. I'll let it dry overnight and then rub it once more with Clenzoil.

 

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R

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Interesting. I've neve soaked stocks, usually I do:

 

Soak a pad of 0000 steel wool with blo and scrub the stock, let dry for 20 minutes dry with a rag and let sit for 24 hrs.

repeat that^

Pour some BLO in my hand and rub the wood with the oil until it gets 'warm', let sit for 20 minutes, dry with a rag and let dry for 24 hrs

Repeat that^

 

I do this with all my military gun stocks and it comes out great and it will leave cartouches perfectly intact if they are present.

 

I'll be doing this in a couple days to a M1 carbine stock and a ruger 10/22 stock that I 'cloned' into an M1A1 carbine stock (it's nearly impossible to find a wood folding stock for a 10/22). If you want I can provide pictures of my process.

 

Lastly, your workbench is far cleaner than mine is.

Edited by Kilroy
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I have a good gunstock oil story. When I was in high school I was a janitor at a department

store and sometimes we got additional odd jobs from the maintenance company. One weekend

me and my buddy had the job to re-oil all of the wood desks in a big office that took up 2 floors

of a small office building.

We were provided with one quart cans that were labeled "gunstock oil". That was it. The drill

was, go into the office, put all of the stuff on the desk on the floor so you could put it all back later.

Using rags, put down a heavy coating of the oil, let it sit, then wipe it off the residue with clean rags.

Of course, as we did the work the "clean" rags got more and more soaked with oil and we had to

keep using new ones.

Half way thru - there were maybe 30-40 desks to do, we decide to break for lunch - run to

McDonalds for a Big Mac. What to do with the rags while we are gone? There was a wooden

parquet floor in front of the elevators. My idea was to neatly stack all the rags on the wood floor.

When we come back, since the floor is wood, we just wipe up/rub in any oil.

Off we go to McDonalds. We come back, and go to finish the job and my friend goes to

pick up the rags and burns his hand! You could see the heat waves rising above the

neatly folded rags. We got there just before the rags would have burst into flames! Spontaneous

combustion.

As a kid I had always heard during fire prevention week about the danger of "oily rags"

and I thought it was BS. But its not.

Any rags used for linseed oil, turpentine, oil paint etc. should not be left folded or crumpled

but hung as if you are drying them to prevent the reaction which leads to the combustion.

 

Bob

(The kid who almost burned up the Pittsburg Plate Glass company at Noble Plaza)

Edited by reconbob
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I use Howards Feed N Wax to refresh my oiled gunstocks. This product contains no Linseed oil and the

ingredients listed on the bottle are beeswax, carnuba wax and orange oil. The nice thing about it is it's dry and

ready to use in about an hour. I can understand why the government used linseed oil when firearms such as the Thompson and the M1 were originally built but I avoid it due to drying issues and I live in the semi-arid Southwest.

Jim

Edited by james m
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1930's:

Pick your poison. Freeze your ass off and work on your Thompson (or Sten or Uzi), or move to Krazyfornia where the weather is always glorious and all you're allowed to own is a staple gun (but you can't load more than 10 staples at a time.)

 

Your front yard will thaw out in time - things out West just keep getting worse.

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Or you can try Florida and enjoy the outdoors with your Thompson any day of the year..only thing prohibited is shoveling snow!!

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just so you know, BLO is a very soft, weak finish

 

it was used just because it was cheap

 

tung oil is better

 

less hand grime and other dirt gets into the wood if it's sealed better

 

that's actually the purpose of finishing wood, to protect it

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Or you can try Florida and enjoy the outdoors with your Thompson any day of the year..only thing prohibited is shoveling snow!!

I lived in Fla most my life and let me tell you about snow! It snows all the time [liquid snow]! Keep your toys' WELL OILED'. GK

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