I knew that stippling looked familiar! Gorgeous work man!
Hey for you guys (
@Decker9 @eLightfoot )that have done this a couple of times. For those of us wanting to dabble a bit, or even try and make a stock just for funsies, would making a blank up out of pine as a practice slab work ok? Yes, the grain would be a pain and its not as solid and nice to work with and keep straight, but to get kind of a feel for it, would that be a bad idea? or even to rough up a concept design to see ballpark how it would feel?
I have used both pine and soft hardwoods like cherry and birch in a few cases, but if you're building a rifle stock to
use (as opposed to a model just for fit or proof of concept) I'd avoid pine.
"good" stock wood, has the weight you want, changes dimension minimally with humidity changes, while also being hard enough it doesnt compress under recoil, it will take and hold intricate inletting and checkering; while also not being "chippy", or "mushy" so you can use edged hand tools with it and make precise cuts without tearing pieces out, and with a tight-enough grain that you can get a good finish on it without excessive effort. Walnut happens to usually be a pretty reasonable fit for this, although there's a lot of variation in walnut even within any of the 3 main walnut species, not to mention just from tree to tree. But a lot of other hardwoods also fit the bill reasonably well. The high-$ walnut blanks you see are expensive in large part becasue they are air-dried, not kiln dried, which allows for better dimensional stability with less internal stress that could cause future warping or cracks.
You could use pine to test a theory or fit for sure. It works and allows you to go very quickly, the danger being that typical pine lumber is so soft it will compress significantly under recoil, so you have to bed and reinforce it and be very careful of any recoil-bearing surfaces. It makes a ok pattern stock if you want to later duplicate via a pantograph, and you can even build areas up with bondo, rasp it down, etc to try different stuff. To me it's just not a good permanent solution for most actual stocks, it's more of a semi-functional scale model to be used in some cases in the process of making a custom stock.
Soft hardwoods like birch or cherry can be OK on some stocks--like a pump or auto shotgun stock which has a big flat recoil-bearing surface. It's better than pine, but still probably a little iffy for a lot of other stocks. With pillars and bedding probably OK for most lower-recoil rifle stocks. Personally, I think it's probably worth getting ahold of a straight grained piece of rough cut maple or similar hardwood without any knots. Given the amount of time to turn it into a stock, the few $ saved by using pine seem like being penny-wise/pound-foolish--your time is worth more than that imo, even if you dont want a fancy walnut blank. I think you ought to be able to get a piece of rough cut maple that would be a pretty good stand-in for walnut for not that much $. Around me rough cut kiln-dried maple is about $5 a board foot, so a rifle blank would be somewhere around $25 give or take. It might be more if you dont have a mill near you, but I'd think it'd be worth it even at multiples of that price if you intend to actually use the stock.
