Repair/refinish military stock

[Pieter C. Voss]

Anybody have any experience filling carved initials/names, etc. on a stock? I recently bought a Krag which is in decent condition and shoots pretty good but someone carved an outline of a bear on one side of the stock and a kind of checkerboard pattern on the other side. Not deep relief carvings--more like what you'd see on a picnic table in a campground. Obviously, they could be sanded out, but it would take a lot of sanding and the stock would end up probably 1/8 in. or so thinner, and the butt plate would have to be shaped to match. I thought there might be a less drastic measure. I did see one of those Larry Potterfield (Midway) videos on YouTube where he showed how to fill small knotholes or screw holes by dabbing a drop of shellac in the hole and then sanding with 220 grit sandpaper--the sanding dust fills the hole. It may take several several applications of this method, depending on the hole. Would something like this work on carvings like I've described?

[3006guns]

I doubt it very seriously......the filler will be a different color no matter how hard you try to "blend" it in. You'll probably end up with the surfaces at the same height with what looks like the inlay of a bear. Try it though, it might work.

It seems to me that there are Krag replica stocks available, but for the life of me I can't remember where I saw them. Despite the cost, that would be the way to repair the situation.

[Multigunner]

I covered a bad looking arsenal repair on the outside of a magazine well by trimming the area flat and gluing a thick piece of veneer over it then sanding the veneer to match the original curve of the area.

I keep scrap paneling and old table tops around as a source of veneer of varying thicknesses and grain.
I leave these outside in the weather till the old glues let go then peel the veneer away in as large a strip as possible. With enough strips to choose from you can usually match any grain fairly closely. If properly stained the repair becomes all but invisible and in some cases completely invisible once finished.
In one repair of a deep gouge I inlaid a piece and used a needle point to carry the line of the grain over from the original wood , when finish you'd need a strong magnifying glas to spot the repair.
To avoid a line at each end I rounded the ends of the cut out and the ends of the inlay and clamped tightly, when set and sanded there was no visible edge as the pieces blended into one another.
Duco wood glue works well for this as the glue will pick up a bit of the natural oils and stains so often any glue that might show ends up the same color as the repaired sections.

I think the veneer method should work well on your stock. Just be sure to find veneer that closely matches the grain.

I make my own walnut stain and when matching shading I thin the stain with rubbing alcohol and apply multiple coats.
At edges where more stain is soaked up by the first coat the rubbing alocohol which contains water doesn't dry as fast as the surface so once the rest of the surface dries you can apply more stain and little or none will soak into the still damp edges. If done properly you won't have darker edges to show up the joins.

I've used thinned sepia ink betwen applications of stain a few times to give the repair an aged look to match an aged finish.

It takes a lot of practice, but I started out repairing antique sewing machine cases and worked my way up.

With a huge surface area to repair you may as well strip the wood and leech out as much oil as possible by repeated washing and drying using Tri-Sodium- Phosphate solution.

[koehn,jim]

Try sanding the stock and mixing the saw dust with a good glue and use that as a paste the wood holds stain, thats what some woodworkers do.

[Char-Gar]

There will be nothing you can do that will not be noticable. I have refinished military stocks with such carvings on them before. I use a stripper to remove the old finish, build a damn of childs modeling clay around the carvings, and fill them with glass bedding compound with some of the dye that comes with them trying to match the color of the finished wood. I remove any glass above the wood surface (and there will be some) with a double cut file. I then sand with a block to level every thing out. I might give the whole stock a light sanding, but nothing more. The stock will be smooth, but the carvings will still be visable. When somebody buggers a stock that bad, you can make improvement, but that is about all. cracks and chips are far easier to make disappear than such carvings.

Unless I am am doing a repair, I don't sand the stock at all.

[Lead Fred]

You can buy new wood, if you want ot perfect, go that way.
Save your self a bunch of time.

[405]

Anything you do will be even more of a re-finish... and look like it! Leave the carving alone and imagine who or why they put it there- after all it is part of that rifle's history. I'd be tempted to just take a rag soaked in liberal amounts of denatured alcohol and give the stock a light cleaning. Then rub on a very light coat of linseed cut with mineral spirits 50/50 or Tru Oil cut with mineral spirits 50/50 and call it good.

[shooterg]

Boyd's makes stocks - not cheap though, but Krag originals are hard to find. Someone may well buy yours to use the forward part for a repair to a shortened(sporterized) original.
Me , for instance !

[Pieter C. Voss]

Thanks to all for your replies. I like Multigunner's repair suggestion--I'll be on the lookout for anything I can peel veneer from.

[bunkysdad]

I wonder if the CMP has any replacement stocks?