I started one gun with the figured piece of cherry, it was a nice blank. I hate to tell this on myself but as I was cutting out the forestock width, I ran the extra wide blank into my bandsaw, I got about a foot into the blank when I realized I was cutting down the center line of the barrel. Perhaps you all have had one of those moments when you actually wanted to slap yourself, this was one of mine. I glued the blank back together and made the split invisible. I gave it to my friend who will make some kind of gun out of it, he will hide the split like it was never there.
After all this cutting I came to the conclusion that it is better to buy a good blank than spend weeks trying to salvage marginal wood.
I am a bow maker and have dried more bow wood than I can remember. Experience from this type of wood collecting taught me how to treat wood.
I have bow wood and once had three times this amount in storage. This is only one of the other three sections of my stored wood.
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I had heard green cherry blanks were bad to warp and check, with my method leaving the blank vastly oversized (3" wide +), shellacking the entire green blank and keeping the wood protected from extreme heat changes, not one of my cherry blanks warped or had the slightest check on it anywhere. I cut a green walnut blank and had the same good results.
I have one well-seasoned cherry blank left that has a knot in the wrist that may be gone on the finished gun, if not it can be patched and hidden. The blank is 3" wide so there is lot of wiggle room, I wasn't thinking when I cut the blank out, I had plenty of room to move the knot up under the side plate location.