AmericanLongRifles Forums
General discussion => Antique Gun Collecting => Topic started by: hurricane on December 21, 2008, 07:55:14 PM
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With the abundance of woods available and other firearms done in other woods, why maple?
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Maple is the natural choice for the longrifle or fowler. It is first in strength, density, and most importantly, stability. For shorter firearms, walnut, especially English walnut, and cherry serve very well - preference to walnut. The natural beauty of maple in it's flamboyant figure was an obvious plus too.
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As Taylor said, maple is simply the best of the timber sized woods that grew in the U.S. Sugar maple and most red is hard, dense, stable, diffuse porous (no large pores in the spring wood), carves well and often blessed with attractive grain.
There is also fashion to consider. Gunsmiths in New England seem to have preferred cherry and walnut despite living in sugar maple country. I've always found that odd because New England made furniture is often curly maple. Go figure!
European walnut, which is also an excellent stock wood, was not readily available here and fruit woods like pear rarely reach the size to make wide boards for cutting long rifle blanks.
Maple has been the wood of choice for bowling allies and basketball courts for years and recently it has replaced ash as the wood for professional baseball bats. Same list of reasons--hard, stable, etc.
Gary
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I have always felt the NE gunmakers preferred Cherry because it has all the good features of maple but also has a very straight grain. A good NE rifle stock is cut so that the grain runs pretty much straight along the wrist. Decorative fashion in NE leaned to silver wire inlay and cherry is good for that also. Its a choice of function over appearance.
Really decorative striped maple seems to me more a feature of later Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifles, when they were moving toward smaller bores and more flamboyant decoration. The earliest rifles, of which I think there are so few that it is hard to make generalizations, seem to have less decorative stocks but that could easily be because the fancy ones broke and are represented today by re-stocked rifles. In any case, of the 11 or 12 NE Rifles I've had, only one has a striped maple stock and its cracked diagonally between the lock and sideplate.
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I've always wondered if the Puritan background of much of early New England, particularly in Massachusetts, put a damper on "showy" woods such as curly maple, or other highly figured wood, where it might have been considered too ostentatious and not in keeping with their modest ways..... at least in the early years while maple was coming into favor in PA and elsewhere. Shelby Gallien
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Really decorative striped maple seems to me more a feature of later Kentucky/Pennsylvania rifles, when they were moving toward smaller bores and more flamboyant decoration. The earliest rifles, of which I think there are so few that it is hard to make generalizations, seem to have less decorative stocks ....
I agree that in general the golden age rifles that were more elaborately carved, inlayed, etc. may have a somewhat higher amount of figure in the wood--- however, both the brass barreled rifle (dated 1771) and rifle #42 in RCA have very nice curly wood. Those are two examples that come to mind without even opening a book.
Gary