I have a crazy idea about taking some of the birch I have growing on my quarter section and making blanks for rifle and possibly handgun stocks. A few questions before I go further.

What is the minimum diameter of tree to start with?

What would be the appropriate size for a standard rifle blank?

Other than avoiding the sap wood and the core what parts of wood should be avoided?

How long should the blanks be dried prior to beginning shaping? Assuming storing indoors and avoiding freezing temperatures. That being said can wood be dried outside where protected from rain and snow but exposed to freezing temperatures?

Other thoughts or input are welcome.

Thanks

GRF

I’ve worked up stocks from walnut before. I wanted a tree about 18” in diameter at a minimum. Slabs are sawn @ 3” in thickness to accommodate a cheekpiece if desired. About 2 1/2” if you don’t want a cheekpiece. The best figure in a walnut tree is in the taproot (stump figure) and the crotch where larger limbs branch off the main trunk ( crotch or feather crotch figure). It goes without saying, when I take a walnut tree, I bring a shovel and backhoe. The worst mistake you could make was to cut off at ground level. You’re leaving the best wood in the ground. We’d dig up the stump section, fell the tree and only then measure off eight or more feet in length before cutting. I’d sometimes get with the sawmill ahead of time and ask them what length they wanted the logs. I only dug up walnuts that were in the woods, never a yard tree, as the mill wouldn’t take it. The usual and customary length of time to cure was one year per inch of thickness of the slabs. Standard drying techniques were used. Inside a barn out of the rain, inch spacers between stacked slabs, ends of the slabs painted or paraffin sealed to prevent splitting.

All that being said, birch may or may not be any different from what I just said…..I’m sure there are more experts on here that can weigh in.

Thanks Godogs!

Anytime

GRF;
Good afternoon my friend, I hope that you and yours are well on this warm afternoon.

While I'm far from an expert, I have built a few stocks from a chunk of wood.

Without going out to the shop to measure the slabs of walnut in the tack room, I want to say that I'd like at least 2.25" wide and 2.5" would be better. I'd also prefer at least 8" height.

The hardwood suppliers we dealt with when I was in the cabinet and furniture making business never kept any wood inside out of the cold or heat. They're in a closed building but that's all.

Birch is okay to work with, though it's tough to get stained evenly - like maple it often stains a wee bit blotchy.

If you're ever passing through here and you've got some room, I'd be happy to hack off a chunk of the black walnut slabs I've had for decades now. I've given some slabs to a few folks over the years, have built a few more stocks and still have more than I will ever use in this lifetime.

Also if I can be of any use, please don't hesitate to give me a shout.

All the best.

Dwayne

The old Indian trick to staining birch: leather dye.

Thanks Dwayne!!


The idea of using birch is just to have something from my own land.

Birch is not strong enough nor stable enough to use for stocks, generally. I suspect from your location, you are looking at paper birch, which is the worst of the birches. Yellow birch is far better than paper, especially in stability.

For a rifle of modest recoil it is possible to do.

Drying birch is difficult because it dries quickly but not uniformly which leads to warping issues. Air drying is difficult to control. Most stock makers refuse to use kiln dried wood.

While birch may have plenty of figure it has very little "depth."

The best figure is often in the stump as you pointed out, but it is the buttresses leading down the trunk and out into the flat root portion of the root where the best blanks live. The actual tap root is usually quite vertical in walnuts and tapers quickly.

Thanks Sitka, I will try to determine what kind of birch we have.

It's paper birch that we have at the "farm", so less than ideal for gun stocks.

Thanks to all who have chipped in with advice and perspectives! Hope y'all have a wonderful day.

GRF

Paper birch is tough to deal with. Most of the yellow grows in Canada and a huge percentage of that has a French accent when the wind makes it whisper!

Sitka, our interior Alaska birch is some strong stuff. After that 3/4" of freezing rain bowed em over, very few broke over my dog training trails.

I milled some up for the top sides of a dump truck. Excavator dropped a massive quartz rock that hit the dump topside boards. Not a single crack.....

Making a stock requires a unique set of properties and few woods really compete with walnut. It is possible you found a tree with much denser and harder than normal wood, but it will still come in far short of walnut.

I remember back in the day shooting M-14’s, my favorite military rifle. Most times the stocks were walnut or God forbid, that plastic crap. Many times though my rifle wore a birch stock. Supposedly it was just as strong, if not stronger, than walnut. Occasionally I’d shoot an M-14 tricked out by the USAMTU and it wasn’t unusual to see a birch stock there as well.

Go figure

Your thinking birch but it's probably beech which is fairly common in military and commercial gunstocks.

Bingo

For the purpose of stocks (on a comparable density basis) there are few woods close walnut. Beech is quite strong but very unstable in use. Birch is not even close.

Oak fails because it splits readily.

Cherry is a little brittle.

Mesquite works, as do a couple maples, myrtle is good but hard to dry, and after that the pickings get slim.

Agree on all points….just know what more than one armorer told me. But, whatever it was, I preferred good ol walnut. Was told that they had less problems with birch moving once it was bedded. As you know, correctly bedding an M-14 or M-1a is a little more tricky than a 700.

Here ya go…..

https://www.fredsm14stocks.com/M14-Birch-Rifle-Stock-Presentation-grade-STB002.htm

Well, sorry to say, but Fred is absolutely wrong on just about every point. Arguing against Physics is usually a bad plan.

Will post the US Forest Products Lab chart on wood mechanical properties when I get to a real computer.

Many many years ago back in the 60’s, living on the farm just on the NW edge of the Duck Mountains Mb, Dad had bought an old bent bolt 98 Mauser in 8mm.
He wanted it modernized a bit as he didn’t like the issue stock or sights.

One guy that we would call a gun nut today, lived in a one room house- maybe 16x 20 with a wife and 9 kids. In those years we were the Ozarks of Manitoba!

He made a stock out of birch that he had cut down and fashioned a peep sight from a piece of light angle iron.
Stock was blonde & beautiful, ($15) had a bit of figuring to it and Dad figured he could shoot gophers with it if ammo wasn’t $3.50 a box.
To the op, I’d say do it!!!

While birch may be suitable... paper birch really is not... Manitoba puts you in the western edge of yellow birch range...

I have a side line making custom "professional grade, sorta" croquet mallets. Don't laugh, it really is a "thing" with the college crowd, and provides me with some serious (to me) gun money. The mallet shafts are strictly ash (think baseball bat material) for resilience, the heads are pretty much anything the customer wants but I steer them toward what works. These heads, typically 3" square x 12" long and weighted with lead inside to meet regulations, take a beating unlike a gunstock will and need to resist abrasion/bumps/nicks/moisture/etc. So far out of 100+ units, I've used walnut, hard maple, and cherry, plus one solid ebony and a couple solid rosewoods. Walnut absorbs the repeated shocks of ball whacking best. Counterintuitively the maple ones, while harder, develop the most hairline cracks and cherry is the quickest to actually chunk out. (Note the ends are faced with a tough 1/4" thick polymer plate but that merely delays the inevitable because of energy transfer into the wood.) The ebony one I doubt will ever actually be played with, it hangs on an egotistical champion's wall.

gnoahhh;
Good morning to you sir, I hope that the day has started well for you out in Maryland and that all who matter in your life are healthy.

Thanks kindly for that interesting information, I enjoy that very thing about our 'Fire, that is to say learning something that one would not otherwise learn.

When I was in the cabinet and furniture making line of work, we primarily used White Oak at first in the '80's, but then began to use Eastern Maple, European Beech, Cherry, American Black Walnut, Birch, Alder, Doug Fir and White Pine. Besides the European Beech, the hardwoods all came from stateside, usually Michigan if I'm not recalling wrong?

Of course the White Pine and Doug Fir made for super soft cabinet doors. We'd distress most of the pine and both species went mostly to ski communities in Montana and Alberta.

Machining Eastern Maple always gave us the greatest challenges for sure in that the tooling had to be sharp and we'd take less of a cut on the thickness planers when milling laminated panels.

Beech and Walnut were the nicest to machine or maybe better said had the least blowout or fall off parts from machining issues.

It's wild to hear about Cherry chunking out and Maple cracking, but thinking about how it machined I can sort of see that about the Cherry.

I do recall we had the devil's own time getting all the pitch pockets sealed for a nice finish on most Cherry panels and then Maple didn't stain evenly with lighter colors so that was a challenge too.

We in production begged the sales staff not to sell kitchens to customers using a 3"x3" sample panel which always looked like it had even coloration, but they'd respond that issue was a "production side problem" to solve...

Thanks again for the interesting information on how the wood reacts to impact.

All the best.

Dwayne

[img]https://www.fpl.fs.fed.us/documnts/fplgtr/fplgtr113/ch04.pdf[/img]

Trying to get the Mechanical Properties of Wood Chart to post automatically and I have failed...

Pull up the pdf and look at pages 2,3, and 4. The numbers are small and the chart is dense. Phones need not apply as the chart is big. For stock purposes, even the 12% dry numbers are not very useful except as rules of thumb.

There is no doubt there is some latitude in using marginal woods and there is the occasional very dense, hard specimen in a given species which will have significantly better chances of making a decent stock. A great example is bigleaf maple where denser examples are the only NA hardwood that exceeds walnuts in most important properties applying to stocks...

Interesting experience there, thank you.

From the chart above we can easily see where walnut is far stronger than birch in virtually every category that makes a difference in stocks. Because of the OP's location I compared paper birch. Sweet birch has slightly better numbers so I am using it first but adding yellow to make it easier to see both:


walnut weight 0.55 rupture 14,600 elasticity 1.68 work 10.7 impact bending 34 Comp. par. 7,580 Comp. per. 1,010 Shear 1,370 Tension Per 690 Side Hardness 1,010
sweet birch weight 0.65 rupture 16,900 elasticity 2.17 work 18.0 impact bending 47 Comp. par. 8,540 Comp. per. 1,080 Shear 2,240 Tension Per 950 Side Hardness 1,470
yellow birch weight 0.62 rupture 16,600 elasticity 2.01 work 20.8 impact bending 55 Comp. par. 8,170 Comp. per. 970 Shear 1,880 Tension Per 920 Side Hardness 1,260


Weight numbers are actually specific gravity and obviously the higher density relates to a heavier stock. Walnut weighs about the right amount...

Rupture, elasticity, and work to failure together highlight the fact birch is much springier or less stiff than walnut. Stiffness is extremely important. These measures are taken during gradual bending.

Impact bending is a measure of how much the test piece bent with sudden impact rather than the more gradual tests. Again, much stiffer.

Compression Parallel (comp par) is a measure of much pressure it takes to crush the sample, lenghtwise. Because of the difference in density there is "more wood in the birch than walnut" so it will be harder to crush. The cost for the greater crushing resistance is extra weight in the stock.

Compression Perpendicular (comp per) is the measure of crossgrain pressure required... about the same numbers yet the greater weight of the birch adds nothing to this property.

Shear is essentially the resistance to splitting under force along the grain. Birch bends rather than splitting.

Tension Perpendicular to the grain is a function of how easy it is to pull the wood apart across the grain.

Side Hardness (Janka) is the weight required to press a 1/2" steel ball halfway into the wood.

Knowing walnut's place as the acknowledged king of stock wood it is easy to see which properties are most important. Stiffness rules...

Fort McMurray Alberta burned in a forest fire a few years ago. I noticed that the birch (likely paper) was the most prevalent tree that had not fallen over in the fire.

Everybody can recognize a paper birch... no one can identify a yellow or sweet...

I have a related question if I may ask, I have several Black walnuts that will be ready for harvest in 15-20 years. One of the trees recently died and is approx 22" at breast height. I had hoped to have a buttstock or two made from some of the crotch wood.

Can the center of the log be included in the blank or does the log have to be big enough to get the entire blank out of half the diameter of the log?

Thank you

Sitka deer;
Top of the morning to you sir, I hope that this Wednesday finds you and your fine family well.

As you know we're a bit of a semi-desert down here and as such there's very few paper birch trees.

Now not that far north of us in the Shuswap where we've got family the paper birch is common enough that it's sold for firewood, but down here it's rare enough that I've almost got the handful of paper birch trees that I'm aware of named.

What we do have however is this birch - the water birch so this says. For years I called it Black Birch, but I believe I was in error doing so as they're not here but the water birch is.

https://www.for.gov.bc.ca/hfd/library/documents/treebook/waterbirch.htm

When the fire ripped through the mountain up behind the house last year there was a pretty good sized water birch scorched and killed with easy access, so I picked it up last fall and it's been seasoning ever since.

It's pretty light though Sitka and I suspect it won't be much better than Doug Fir as far as heat units goes.

We occasionally get orchard wood for firewood and for sure it feels lighter and softer than apple or cherry, but to be clear I didn't do a side by side test or anything resembling a test truly.

All the best to you all as we head into the fall and hunting season Sitka.

Dwayne

tcp;
Good morning to you sir, I hope the day is looking to be a good one in your section of the midwest and all who matter to you are well.

With the understanding that if someone else tells you I'm wrong, I recommend listening to them, I'd say this about that.

When we were making cabinet parts and doors, we didn't want the centers of the tree or any heartwood as it wouldn't stain or machine the same, even if the coloration wasn't too, too bad. Usually though the coloration wasn't the same either so there was that.

While I've only made a handful of stocks starting with a board, from that I'd suspect that I want the grain to be as stable as possible so the wood doesn't wander as I remove material during the stock making process as well. Hopefully that makes sense?

I've had some factory stocks just keep bending in a particular direction and relieving them just meant they'd keep going in that direction. I suspect it was either improperly dried or just "one of those" blanks that is going to do that and we all hope not to get when we're making a stock.

Again if someone else has better info, I'd go with their opinions.

Good luck with the tree regardless and all the best.

Dwayne

Dwayne covered part of the issues with the core, but there are many more. The first couple inches from the heart and all branch wood is "reaction wood" and the heart close to the center is further defined as "juvenile wood." While growing it was subjected to lots of bending and other stresses which later wood sees less of. As a reaction the cells are shorter with lots more cells other than fiber. Because of that it dries erratically and develops lots of internal stresses. It should not be included in stocks. The only exception would be crotch wood.

When you cut the crotch start in the middle and cut to produce two "Y" shaped slabs. Then cut your blanks from there after slabbing. Expect to have issues in drying and to need some crack filling... but it is worth the trouble. Seal all surfaces ASAP and move them out of the sun even faster.

Do not overlook the stump, especially if there are buttresses. Dig out around the roots and you may find some very nice figure. 22" dbh is absolutely worthy, hoping/assuming sapwood is thin. IME sweeter soils lead to thicker sapwood.

And a good morning to you Dwayne! We have the water birch here also and the wood is very similar to paper. It is frequently called black or Kenai. Larch is about the best firewood we have in AK, just not close to me.

Dwayne and Sitka, thank you for the replies. The tree grew on the edge of a pasture so has several crotches where large branches came off the trunk. Hopefully I can salvage something more interesting than firewood from it.

Another cool bit of figure can be found below limbs in a board-sawn blank, called Angel's Stairs.

angels Stairs in maple

Having troubles getting a link to show.

Just because it may not be the ideal wood for a stock doesn't mean it can't be done or hasn't been done a jazillion times.

The Russians used birch on their Mosin Nagant rifles due to its durability and ability to stand up to freezing temperature and harsh environments from their inception until 1943 (after that they went to a laminated stock made from - you guessed it - birch). It's very light in color when the amber shellac is taken off and very hard to get it to take an oil based stain. The artic birch the Finns used on their Mosin Nagants, was spliced in many places, able to withstand temps well below -40 and the war-time artic birch stocks on the Finnish Mosins exhibit beautiful grain. Some of our M-14s were issued with birch and some of our M1 Garands were stocked with birch as a replacement to the original walnut.

Birch is a durable and tough wood. Cut some and throw it somewhere dry for a while and then mess around with it. If it feels like an aspen pole, chuck it.

It can be a pain to oil stain. Leather dyes in alcohol work well. Read the following thread for more info that you'll ever use on the subject.

https://castboolits.gunloads.com/showthread.php?308912-Tips-for-refinishing-Birch-stocks

Baltic birch is a whole different animal...

Think for example about black walnut and butternut... very different woods, very closely related.

When I was a kid of 11 or 12 I made a stock from a Butternut plank for a savage 340 .222 that had a broken stock. A kid, no money, few tools and little talent but made a serviceable stock that served me well for a few years until I sold the gun. Even checkered it with an old dull Herters checkering tool my grandpa had. Butternut can be a pretty lighter colored wood with similar grain patterns to walnut but soft, softer than a cheap Claro blank and made for some fuzzy crooked checkering, I called it the over run pattern, lol.

On that note I've always wondered why some trees have fiddle back figure and some don't, trees grown side by side the same age one will and one won't. Same as maple, some will be fiddleback, some birdseye, and the next one beside it will be plainer than a 2x4 spruce stud. Always wondered about that.