Moving wood/shrinking

[Slowpoke]

This rifle was built about 2 years ago from a blank that was at least 15 years old. Built this rifle for my brother and he had it above his fireplace where he has a wood stove. :cursing: Now look at it !!! (I wish Claude would get a ("strangling my brother") smilie so I could use it here. Anyway, I'm gonna keep it in my bathroom for a couple weeks and see if I can get the wood back to normal but I doubt it. I smothered it with Krammer's Wood Restorer... we'll see. Anyone ever had this happen ???

 

[Roy]

First off beautiful work. :bow:

And yes I have seen it happen on one of Dad's guns, It may go back by leaving it in the bathroom. Moister content here on seasoned or dried wood is around 13%, doesn't matter how old it is (learned this from building bows).

 

[GobblerKnob]

Slowpoke ~ You have my condolences. I have never seen wood act that way before. Who would have thought that leaving a rifle suspended above a fireplace would produce such fine engraving and architecture! :rotf:
Rick

 

[tnlonghunter]

Okay, forgive a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem? I'm not sure what to look for.

 

[Slowpoke]

Okay, forgive a stupid question, but what exactly is the problem? I'm not sure what to look for.

See the way the brass finial (that's what I call it) is popping out of the wood and how the wood is shrinking away from the butt and toe plate. The stuff that's inlayed into the wood is coming out. No stupid questions here my friend.

Roy, thanks for the compliment but I need to come to Georgia and hang around your shop for a while.

 

[Roy]

You are welcome to any time you want, heck bring that gun should bring it right back to normal. In the summer here it gets good and humid, sort of like your walking in gelatin. :v

 

[Vaino]

I take it that all the surfaces of the stock have been sealed? Sold 2 LRs and a couple of years later the buyers complained that the PBox lids woundn't close.Wood shrinkage was the culprit and some judicious filing corrected the problems. I guess working too close and not allowing for some "slop" might be not the way to go. By the way, these stocks were completely sealed. Have had trouble w/ filing the lower butt molding contour into the buttplate and then had to re-do because of wood shrinkage. Now I don't file the buttplate, but instead just leave it straight. The heating season in the North w/ it's attendant low humidity is the cause of a surprizing amount of shrinkage and one wonders how the "originals" survived as well as they did.......Fred

 

[aragorn]

We have high humidity here in summer, then dry cold in winter. Over the last ten months of building my current rifle it shrunk noticeably in the winter from all my perfect inletting of the previous summer, especially in the barrel tang area. I'm really hoping by the time I seal the wood in about two months it will have absorbed moisture again, and I'm also hoping that sealing the wood will prevent this happening to the finished gun every year.

 

[aragorn]

I forgot to say, fantastic work on that brass - I also really had to look hard to see what the problem was!

 

[rich pierce]

It's normal for the mounts to "stand proud" of the wood after a time. There's no way to avoid it as far as I know, and there are guys who make their guns look that way from the get-go. I have a rifle I made in 1978 and it's still aging that way.

 

[Slowpoke]

I know what you mean Rich, but my personality is such that this is going to bother me. :rotf: I'll give a report back in a month and take some more pictures.

Gotta catch a flight to S.C. Need 2 more turkeys.... gobble, gobble.