Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Savage Collectors Favorite way to maintain wood stock

What is the proper way to maintain the oiled finish on 99 stocks. How often do you take them out of the safe and oil them?I have 4 99's and have in the old days just used Hoppes. Nowadays there must be something better I would think, thanks, Tom.

Equal parts Boiled Linseed Oil, Beeswax and Turpentine (or Mineral Spirits if you don't like the smell). Melt together outdoors (fire hazard) and adjust ratio of beeswax to attain a solution with the viscosity of furniture wax. Decant into a convenient container such as baby food jars. (Do they still sell baby food in jars?) This is an old Army Ordnance mixture (or so I was told by the WWII-era Army Artificer who turned me on to it). Application is simple: "wax on, wax off." Leaves the wood with a nice soft lustre. Smells good too.

Or you can just buy some Snake Oil and get pretty much the same result. Definitely stay away from petroleum distillates as they will affect the wood adversely.

Tom

I also have four 99's....I use Scott's "Liquid Gold" on all my stocks. I't's a wood cleaner and preservative..
Works great for bringing out the grain in the wood and may make the stock a little darker.

I take mine out of the safe and wipe them down almost every day, however a couple times a year would probably be enough.

Good Luck

Joe

Another vote for Old West Snake Oil. It's good stuff. I use it on all my guns a couple times a year.

Howard feed-n-wax is another option.

Snake Oil. Not too often though..

+1 on the Howard's. And available locally.

+1 ...... I've seen folks use too much and clog up the checkering ... looks like [bleep] .

Personally , I like boiled linseed oil .... use an old toothbrush to work the excess out of the checkering .

It was good enough for the Savage factory to use = good enough for me .

That's why I like the formula I described above. The BLO replicates the factory finish, the wax provides the only real water vapor barrier to the wood (BLO being virtually useless in that regard) and the solvent is merely a carrier/drier. So many proprietary "restorers" leave an un-natural shine to the wood that is kind of garrish. Pretty hard to overdo it with this stuff, too.

The factory used Linseed Oil because it was cheap, not because it was the best thing to finish wood with.