When you get your hands on a vintage weapon, the wood is often black from embedded grease, cosmoline and the sweat and oil from 70 years of handling. If the weapon is rare or historically significant, then you'd want to leave that alone because you'd hurt the value. If you get your hands on Buffalo Bill's Sharps rifle or Herman Goering's Luger, then leave it alone! But, with most vintage arms and almost all WWII arms, that's not an issue. You'll want to clean them up for your own satisfaction and to make them display better. The value of a restored weapon will increase rather than decrease. The problem is, if you sand heavily to get that imbedded crap out of the wood then you'll also remove any marks or stamps on the wood - and the use of solvents like acetone or various chemical strippers will bleach some of the nice grain out, leaving you with with very bland wood looking more like beech than fine walnut. Here's an easy way to restore wood to factory condition. Buy a box of cheap powdered laundry detergent and mix a couple of cups per gallon into some water. Drop your wood in and walk away for about a week. After a week or so, pull the wood out and roll it in dry laundry detergent as if you're coating a drumstick to make southern fried chicken. Wrap in plastic and walk away for perhaps two days. When you come back you'll find that the detergent coating has turned brown or yellow, drawing all the crap out of the wood. Rinse it off and examine the wood. Particularly, you want to look at the grip area on the stock and forearm and see if they are the same color as areas with less handling. If the areas match, then you're done. But... they probably won't. Most old guns take at least two such treatments before they're ready. So, repeat until the wood looks clean in every area. When the wood is free of stains, drop it into clean water for a few days. You do this for two reasons - one is to remove any detergent left in the wood, and the other reason is that you want that wood to be very wet so you can iron out any dents. To do that, take a clean piece of wet cotton and lay it over the dent. Take a hot iron - not too hot, you don't want to scald or discolor the wood; just hot enough that you can't touch it - and iron out the dent. With wood this heavily waterlogged the dent should disappear very easily. Now, of course, put the wood someplace to dry slowly. When it's dry, sand very lightly - you just want to open the grain a bit to accept stain and oil. You don't want to remove any stamps or cartouches that will now be visible on the wood. I use 0000 steel wool. If you use sandpaper, makes sure it's very fine. Staining is optional. If the wood had good grain while it was wet, that's how it's going to look after oiling. If you want better grain, then give it a light coat of any good walnut stain. American military arms generally were oiled rather than lacquered. So, the following will apply to US arms and may or may not be correct for arms from other countries. Traditionally, boiled linseed oil is the preferred finish. But... I've found it slow to dry and it is of course permeable, which is why the wood was so badly stained in the first place. I've found Tung oil gives an identical oiled appearance that is much harder and less permeable IF APPLIED AS I DESCRIBE. I generally use Homer Formby's satin oil because that's what is available around here, but I'm sure any brand would work. Mix the Tung oil (satin finish not glossy finish) with isopropyl alcohol at a ratio of 1:4 - 1 part Tung oil to 4 parts alcohol. Tung oil does not want to mix with alcohol so you need to shake it up frequently. Mixed this lightly, you can just apply it with a brush. You should wait at least 12 hours between coats, maybe 24 hours if you live in a humid climate. The first two or three coats will just soak right into the wood which is what you want because it fills the air pockets in the wood with oil which will harden and make the wood impermeable. Generally, you begin to see a nice oiled finish after about 5 coats. I like to put on about ten coats before I consider it done. Since you are applying the oil so heavily diluted, you don't need to sand between coats, just brush off any dust or lint that gets stuck to the wood. This sounds like a long and difficult process but since you're only devoting a few minutes a day to do it, it's actually much easier than it sounds. When you're done, the wood will look like it just rolled off the factory floor. The only thing you can't fix are actual chips or cracks in the wood - if the wood is free of those, then you've got a brand new stock. The rifle below is a Belgian G1 made about 1952 for the German army. It ended up in the Turkish army for 40 years then ended up as a pile of parts with the receiver sawed in half. I bought it as a "kit." The wood was actually black - so bad that most people who bought these kits in the late 90's/early 2000's discarded the wood and replaced it with plastic furniture. But, since it was the original FAL - the first incarnation of this historic weapon - I thought it best to at least try to bring that original Belgian walnut back. I had used the technique described above on weapons with much better wood very successfully, but I had my doubts on this wood. Yet, it came out just great! If memory serves, it took three detergent soaks and subsequent "fried chicken" treatments, but in the end all of that gunk came out of the wood. Edited to add: Most US military arms should be dark to be correct - you'll probably want to use that walnut stain. Civilian arms should be lighter, so either no stain or just very light stain.
