pretty wood....nightmare

[smallpatch]

I'm working on carving my second Lehigh.  I've had this beautifully figured piece of super hard red maple for about 3 years.  I now can see the merits of unfigured hard sugar maple.  This thing splits, tears out, details fall of....... absolutely the WORST piece of wood I've ever dealt with.  Very hard, but has a kind of "pithy" (is that a word?) texture.

Sure is pretty..... sure is a pain in my A**.

OK, I feel better now.

[B Shipman]

The kind you make a plain rifle out off.

[Roger B]

I have learned the wisdom of Mr Shipman's post well on this Vincent project.  If you look at this stock wrong it will chip and ruin an inlet in a heart beat.  If I had known that sooner, I wouldn't have started putting decorations on it.  As it is, I've decided to make it a lesson in putting in decorative inlays under tough circumstances and have added more; fixing my mistakes as I go.   By the time I finish it will probably have more plastic in it than a Corvette.  As a matter of fact, I may paint it red and put a big, gold, bow tie on the muzzle.
Roger B.

[Clowdis]

Notice the lack of figure in th Kibler rifle in this thread http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=19289.0   Now I'm sure he could do just as well with a figured blank but a good hard plain piece of maple is normally easier to work. To cut smoothly through figured wood your chisels need to be sharp as razors.

[flehto]

Although  many customers prefer highly figured wood and outside of the fact that it complicates the building and carving, highly figured wood also detracts from the carving. Presently am building 3 LRs using 3 grades of red maple and the lowest grade w/ moderate amount of curl is by far the best working and will "show off" the carving much better than the two much curlier stocks. Personally, have arrived at the conclusion  that highly figured wood should be made into plain LRs. ...let the curl be the highlight.....Fred

[Old Ford2]

Years ago, I built a modern rifle out out bird's eye maple.
It was dense with fine and large bird's eye circles. I was $#*!! The little circles kept falling out, and I had to find them on my shop floor to re-glue them to their appropriate hole. The rifle finished was impressive...........but never again.

Old Ford

[Herb]

Clowdis, I think this is the first citation or reference to an earlier post I've seen here.  Where do you get the topic number?

[Dr. Tim-Boone]

Herb it is the URL copied from the address line at the top of your browser...Here is the one for this topic: http://americanlongrifles.org/forum/index.php?topic=19335.0

[flintriflesmith]

Riflebuilders working in the "Golden Age" had to learn to make fine relief carved and inlayed rifles out of very curly wood. It was what was in fashion at the time and the customers apparently expected it. Look through Kindig's book or any other good source covering 1780-1820 rifles and you will rarely see a straight grain maple stock.

IMHO learning to work with that material is just part of learning to make historically accurate rifles. Of course earlier rifles and much later rifles are a different story.
Gary

Her's an example by Noll:



And a link to another
http://www.flintriflesmith.com/Antiques/Honaker.htm

[D. Taylor Sapergia]

Clowdis nailed it...super sharp tools and small cuts.  ...like longrifle surgery.

[Clowdis]

Clowdis, I think this is the first citation or reference to an earlier post I've seen here.  Where do you get the topic number?

Herb,
You can highlight the URL at the top of the page and then right click, press copy, go back to your post and "paste" it in wherever you want it to be.

[David Rase]

Dane,
The piece of curly walnut I built my Tulle from was the same way.  The only way I was able to work it was sharp tools, go slow and pay attention to the grain.  I relieved wood in thin layers paying attention to the grain and when I felt a chip I either changed tools or the direction of my cut.  Skewing cuts work well also.
Hang in there.  If it makes yo feel any better I have another stock blank from the same plank of walnut to work through.
Dave   

[B Shipman]

Most curly maple works just fine whether a dense piece of red maple or a piece of sugar maple. I rarely use plain wood though in the product it's the last thing of importance as you can see in Jim Kiblers' work. Once in a while you just run into that beautifull piece that you set aside as a total nightmare to carve or do any intricate inletting and make something that doesn't require it. I've been searching for the right word and I think it's "brittle".

[smallpatch]

Bill,

That's exactly right.  That's what this piece is..... brittle.

[flintriflesmith]

I believe that maple being brittle usually comes from a problem somewhere in the kiln drying cycle. Big wood processing places may agree to dry some maple for a stock dealer but they put it in with a load of whatever they are customarily drying rather than using a cycle tailored to diffuse porous hardwood.

Wood can also actually be case hardened by the drying process. If the drying is pushed too fast the outside of the board shrinks so fast that it can actually crush the grain of the wood nearer the center.

I prefer air dried wood that has gone through several years of natural expansion and shrinkage with changes in humidity.

Gary

[B Shipman]

Absolutely true. Yet I get all my wood from only two sources that treat each piece the same.  Sometimes it is the wood as well in all it's variations.

[FALout]

I've seen wood that is slow air dried that was harder then anything kiln dried.  Some wood just gets harder and more brittle as it ages (dries).  Had some oak that my Dad had cut on his property, years after cutting he wanted to make some crown molding, that stuff was so hard, we had to sharpen every molder and planer knive that touched that stuff.  I've never encountered any oak that was as hard as that.
 

[flintriflesmith]

In the world of wood technology "hard" and "brittle" mean very different things. Hardness is related to the woods resistance to denting. Brittle wood has a characteristic of "short breaking" --- breaking across the wood fibers.

Resistance to splitting along the grain and how the wood machines are two more factors wood technologists measure.

All of there characteristics are tied to both nature (species, growth rate, location of the sample in the tree, etc.) and nurture (how the wood is treated for the time it is cut).

Gary