Makes sense to me. Seems like you can have, say, 8-oz of tung oil in a cup to use on your stock. The 8-oz in the cup represents 100% of your finishing material and it is 100% tung. Now I can drain 4-oz out of that cup and add 4-oz of mineral spirits and still have the original 100% (quantity) of finishing material, but now 50% is solvent and only 50% is tung. And, as such, I would expect for that 50/50 solution to only be half as effective in accomplishing the job of finishing a gun stock because it contains less oil. Funny how its called thinner, eh? So now I have to ask if penetration actually decreases with the use of solvents as I would assume such solutions evaporate faster and transport less oil to he wood for every individual application. I also have to ask if it takes longer to get a stock job done for the same reasons. I guess I just came full circle with my dad and now see solvents as primarily good for cleaning up. Sorry for yammering on but I’m sitting here with a cup of coffee waiting on an oil change and as Paul Harvey used to say, “and now you know the rest of the story.”
