Listed in the #60 catalog, 1916 I believe. Don't see it in any other catalogs that I have information on.

It's not the standard "Extra finish", that's listed also.

Extra finish on stock - $2. London oil finish - $2.75.

Probably a little marketing hype for the time. Funny how people would consider a "London Oil Finish" as something valid but think you were nuts if you mentioned a Detroit, Chicago or Kansas City "oil finish." But I could be wrong.

I did a quick google and it appears to be an actual thing. Just didn't have time to read up on it, much less know how it applies to 1899's made around 1916.

Hoped somebody here would be familiar with it.

Dunkelberger will know , Its that deep oil finish. Think Dodge rifle.

What he said!

Probably nothing to do with it but when I was in London I visited the Royal Coach works.
Watched a gentleman finishing a coach door. He explained that he sanded,rubbed,and polished it to a mirror finish, then put 40 coats of secret oil finish on it.
Was splendid thing to see. And the oil smelled like BLO

Lots of linseed rubbed in by English maidens.

Oil with varnish mixed in, the exact proportions closely guarded by whichever old bewhiskered craftsman was mixing it, not to mention the odd metallic compound added here and there to provide mystical qualities. Sometimes a bit of beeswax was melted in and the mixture applied when warm so everything stayed in solution. Secret is to fill the pores first- that's where the extra labor and higher cost comes in. In the olden days varnish was applied and sanded right back down to the bare wood surface taking fastidious care to not sand away the varnish in the pores. Repeated as necessary until the pores are 100% filled and the surrounding wood is bare. (Nowadays varnish is still used- I do- and epoxy is a great substitute. The problem is with varnish it can shrink over time and telegraph through the finish to reveal miniscule pore craters. That's why you should let it cure for a while before oiling to make sure you don't get tricked. Epoxy fixes that but is a royal PIA because it's so hard.) Then the oil/varnish mixture is applied. Wax with a good paste wax when done.

I've yet to meet a proprietary pore filler that beats varnish or epoxy, but they are easier to apply, for sure. (But like all things in this man's world you get what you pay for, and there is no panacea for plain hard work.)

Of course all this works best on thin shell walnut stocks (English/French/Circassian/etc. walnut) with miniscule pores. Our American black walnut with its Grand Canyon-like pores is a bigger challenge.

Sometimes old recipes called for shellac instead of varnish, but to my way of thinking then you're getting into the realm of French Polishes, and besides who wants shellac on a gun stock. (Think about the real possibility of it getting wet when hunting, and harken back to what a wet drink glass does to a shellaced table top- turns white.) On the other hand, if it's an exhibition-only kind of masterpiece, why not?

Somewhere downstairs I have the remainder of an English stock finishing system. It consisted of three parts, an oil, a hardening agent, and something else, I forget what. I used it on several stocks perhaps 25 years ago. Back then I tried to get more of the stuff, but was unable to get any. It came from the U.K. I think that was London oil finish. Now I use Permalyn.

One recipe calls for 50/50 raw Linseed oil/raw walnut oil dyed with Alkanet root.

Raw walnut oil . I wonder how that is produced.

I knew somebody here would know this. Odd it was only listed for a year or few. Wonder if there are any ledger entries for it?

Any of you know what the "Extra finish on stock" entails? I believe that the standard finish during this time would have been varnish. Is it just extra coats of varnish?

That's a good question, and partially why I asked this.

There's high end guns like the bottom one here of Fug's, which definitely might be "Extra finish on stock". It surely has extra coats, but is it just extra finish? Or might this be an example of the London Finish?




But I've seen a few that seem as though they just have a "deeper" or "thicker" finish than normal. This 1899 SR for example. But maybe this one is just "pristine"?

Every time I see pics of Fug's rifles, it makes all mine look like a pile of junk

Nice find!

The article connects the time period, to the catalog extra, to an example and a pics of the example. It's a thing.

As previously stated, the exact recipe & technique are the wild cards.

Maybe extra finish was a way of making your stocks more impervious to the elements more so than an item of luxury. Kind of like using a synthetic stock today as opposed to wood. More a thing of utility in a day when stocks were restricted to wood. Seems to me if you were going to push a high grade stock finish to adorn a high end 99 you would use a term more exotic term "extra." Something more like London or French.

You may be on to something. Although before redoing some stocks in varnish I didn't know how thick to apply them, so experimented on some test boards. The more you put on, the easier it is to harm/break the finish. Maybe the normal varnish finish was just enough to fill and coat the stock, and extra would give the deep glossy finish.

I bet they piled on the varnish, many coats, while blocking out (sanding with semi-hard backed x-fine paper) between coats. 8-10 coats sounds like a lot but when you consider the amount of sanding between coats that's involved the resultant mil thickness isn't that much. It does yield a finish with a lot of "depth". It remains my favorite way to finish walnut. (I just finished building a black walnut table for a client, 12 coats of varnish. She was ecstatic, and paid me more than what I asked for.) No separate pore filling, each successive coat of varnish fills more and more of the pores, and then a couple extra coats after that. For a more subtle luster, I work with glossy varnish (for its better UV protection) and then rub out the final coat to a very dull look. Then a coat of paste wax restores it to a soft elegant luster.

Pretty labor intensive, but the results are worth it - to me.

I've executed varnish finishes that had many coats as I described, and when finally rubbed out and waxed I was accused of creating oil finishes. Some of you may remember the multi-barrel 1899H takedown I built. That's how I did that stock. I'll bet there's more than one high grade gun stock out there purported to be a "London Oil Finish" which in fact is merely a very expertly varnished specimen.

$235 for a 22 rifle in 1915 is quite the price, so probably reflects extra labor in London finish and other add ons. A plain model 1914 was a lot less in 1915. What would $235 be in 2019 dollars?

Oh, around a gazillion dollars I would guess!

Probably around 4k.
Per Wikipedia, a new Model T Runabout cost $390.00 in 1915.

Yup, with extra points awarded for covering the alchemist's patented secrets.

Also addressing the import of wax in building finishes back in the day... and on into today.

Remember the importance of 1916 in history? Who were our primary allies? And the bad guys? Brings up a bunch of trivia for another post/thread...

The inflation calculator shows:

1915 to 2019...

$15 = $382

$235 = $5987

Looks like it would be $5,987.75 in 2019


Edit: didn't see ricks post

I recall back in the 60's, maybe into the early 70's, the Herter catalog store out of Waseca, Minn (for those of you who know what I'm referring to), used to sell some gun stock finish that they referred to be like 'London Oil Finish'! Loved that place, used to pour over a new catalog every year when my Dad would get one, would about wear it out until a new one came.Thought they were the "bees-nee's"! By the time I reached early 20's, some friends and I used to make the 100 mile trip straight north of our town to Herters in Waseca. Was always a fun and interesting Saturday trip! Bought several of the gunstock refinish kits from Herters back then, but can't recall if any of them were of the London variety, but they did a nice job on wood stocks.

Gunmaking firms had their own version of the finish. In short a look at Dunlap's book gives a few. JMO

Ran across this last night.

Col. Townsend Whelen in his "The American Rifle", published 1918:

Griffin and Howe currently offer their custom rifles with a "hand rubbed London oil finish". I suppose they may be unlikely to reveal what that actually entails...

http://griffinhowe.com/custom-rifle/

Right there is where I take exception to the good Colonel's advise. If you rub raw linseed oil into wood it takes forever and a day to dry. After a hellacious long time to achieve a decent finish comprised of many coats of the stuff and waiting for each successive coat to dry, what you end up with is two things: a dark as hell stock whose grain can barely be seen (think all those old milsurp rifles with their dark almost black stocks), and a stock that possesses almost zero protection against water fenestration (no that's not a typo). I bet he wrote that because he lived and breathed military rifle lore and maintenance. The Army didn't care about stock finishing too much. They went with the very cheapest method, oil, to save money per unit not because it was the best protection. What did they care if a stock crapped out, they would just slap another one on and send the rifle on its way back into service.

Varnish (and a bunch of other barrier finishes) offers your best shot at protection against moisture. Period. I maintain that minor scratches in a varnish finish are easier to fix than in an oil finish - you're merely addressing the varnish and not disturbing the wood underneath it, whereas with an oil finish you're actually disturbing the wood surface further with your ministrations. And no amount of rubbing a scratch in an oil finish with more oil is going to make it disappear, you'll end up with a dark line/scratch - you have to sand away the scratch and blend in the oil to match the rest of the finish. No small task, and certainly no easier to deal with than varnish (and you'll end up with a shallow depression where you sanded, such that can be seen in the right light at the right angle).

Jeezus man, slow down, we're just a ditch digger here.

Whether it's good protection or bad protection is a good discussion.. I'm more curious on what exactly Savage meant by "London Oil Finish" in 1916 when they list it in their catalog. Col. Whelen's book in 1918 is pretty close in time to that.

Would this what you'd expect a linseed oil finish to look like from then? It's the P.J. Noel 22 that Rick found pictures of which is described as having a London oil finish.

At the end of the day, "London oil finish" is a look, not a process. That "look" can be achieved a whole lot of ways, all of which entail more labor than that needed for a quick and dirty utilitarian factory finish. I doubt we'll ever know how Savage achieved it- any guesses are just that, and can be as right as the next guy's.

I have a recipe in an old gunsmithing book from the early 1900s. I can't remember which one but the book lists a london oil finish recipe that has lindseed oil, alkanet root, turpentine, venitian turpentine and some sort of wax boiled together. It may have other ingredients in it but those are what I remember. I may look through my books to see if I can find it. It also said the stock with stained with alkanet stain first and the alkanet in the finish was for tint. I'm pretty sure it was sort of a generic term and manufacturers had their own recipes.

And all this time I thought London Oil was something you wore under the Renaissance Wax. Whoda thunk it?

Only if you're a Man About Town in Picadilly Circus!

All this talk of finishes and filling pores, but most of the Savage stocks we love had open pores, am I right?

Now that begs asking a question I've always wondered about. These stocks we are observing are all very old and things oxidize, shrink, tarnish and change with the passing of time. Did the original factory finishes leave the pores open or is that something that happened to the finish with age? Are we looking at original finishes that have, to a degree, broke down over the years? I've refinished a number of bamboo fly rods and I'll tell you right now that orginal varnishes yellow so much with age that you can't tell the original color of the wraps with a visual inspection. Are we kind of doing the same thing with gun stocks? Are we judging an aged finish to be representative of facory fresh? Sometmes I think we are.

Good point, Jeff. Then there's factory finishes that were sprayed on clear lacquer, and in more modern times, sprayed on conversion varnishes that dried quickly and built sufficiently with one or two coats that allows a stock to only spend one day in the finishing dept. Like I said, many ways to skin a cat.

I wish someone had researched this stuff a couple generations ago when there were still some old ex-employees around who could remember the trivial details and possibly also located some old records that I doubt exist anymore. A comprehensive book about Savage lever guns on the scale of Rule's book about Model 70's is probably impossible now. (For example, Rule describes the wood and metal finishing in great detail, and how the processes changed between 1936 and 1964.)

I'll bet there's a bunch of old guys at the Savage factory today who are contemplating retirement who never saw a 99 being built.

I have used equal amounts of BLO Spar Varnish and Paint thinner in a mixture with good results.

Gun Stock Finishing And Care, Copyright 1949



I think this guy and gnoahhh would have been great drinking buddies.

He goes on later in the book to get the look of the Dull London Oil Finish, you build up a base of varnish, then hand rub in at least 3 very thin layers of raw linseed oil with at least 36 hours in a warm spot for each layer to dry.

"HOW TO REFINISH GUN STOCKS", C.S. Landis in the June 1921 Forest And Stream.

Well... "London oil finish", eh! Such stuff, accounting for self & chums banned from a favorite London pub! Ensuing, "dry" fortnight, to recollection! Accused of ignoring the "Road oiling" signs. Tracked it all over the pub floor! That "London oil finish" if not quickly removed, capable of sucking boots off as drying! Definitely "bad show"! But especially as conjuring poor blokes, arriving home to waiting wives under excuse of "working late". Appearing barefoot, all manner of debris clinging underfoot!
I could go on, but perhaps bit off-point?
Another era, perhaps another product, do you think?

> Grain of truth, lot of 'poetic license...' Unable to resist! <

Best & Stay Safe!
John

I'm tellin' ya...

What do you mean? That guy was Gnoahhh, and he is a good drinking buddy.