twisted blank?

[ron w]

I have to agree with Paddlefoot,
    there's a lot work in making a stock.  in that you are making it yourself for yourself, cost is of little concern.  starting with a good blank,... "good" doesn't have to mean "fancy".... is far more worth the savings had buy an unstable piece of wood. I have spent a lifetime working wood, bot professionally and for myself, and can tell you that every time I overlooked some bad aspect of a piece of wood that was going into a nice project, it came back to bite me, in some manner or another. twisted wood.... any species.....whether considered a generally stable species, or not,.. is a headache just waiting to happen and will most likely continue to twist as time goes on,....it's just the nature of the beast. as said,...plain maple has lots of uses and it's just not expensive enough to settle for a piece that won't be pleasingly applicable to the use at hand.

[Eric Krewson]

I don't know if this relates to gun stock wood or not but I have untwisted dozens of osage staves with as much as 45 degree twist with heat and a bucket full of lead. The pipe wrench is the fulcrum and the bucket of lead applies the pressure until the wood straightens out and cools. Once untwisted this way the wood never goes back to its former configuration.



Hickory is a different story and is very hard to correct with heat and stay straight.

I got a precarv shipped back to me without the barrel in the channel, the barrel was misplaced somewhere down the line. The forend was badly warped when I got it back.

I heated the barrel to about 150 degrees, placed it in the channel and used a heat gun to heat the forend wood while I pulled everything into place with zip ties. I continued to heat the wood from the outside and let the hot barrel heat it from the inside. After everything cooled I removed the zip ties and voila, no more warped forend. The forend never returned to its former warped configuration during the rest of the build. 

[WadePatton]

Mr. Krewson gives us good information above but I'd simply forget the 25 bucks and save up to get a 150-dollar blank. 

Some day later you can fool with the twisted wood, and the longer you wait the more stable it will have become.   Or sell/give it away later when you realize you have better things to do than untwisting/resquaring wooden stock blanks.   Or untwist it with heat and water and let it AGE a while before fooling (further) with it.

There's a lot of good wood out there that won't break the bank and will make life a bit simpler.

[ron w]

a twist is somewhat different in tension than a warp in either direction of grain orientation. you can never really completely eliminate wood's expansion and contraction from atmospheric pressure. a wood that is considered "stable" is simply a wood the moves the least in changing weather.  the tensions that cause warp come in the direction of one plane or the other causing the blank to warp either in it's length or across it's width ,both of which are treated by opposing force and some heat with or without a little moisture. as far as warp is concerned,.... movement in one plane doesn't necessarily affect the other.  in the case of twist,... the tensions that cause a twist come from the bias or combination of those same two tensions, so the same movement that would cause warp, causes movement in both directions at the same time, whether movement is in only one plane or in both. that said, the tensions that twist a piece of wood, will work on the blank in a twisting direction every time the wood has movement, which is all the time, even after being cured and sealed because wood never stops expanding and contracting from atmospheric pressures.

[P.W.Berkuta]

I have a maple blank,  that is twisted, and I  paid very little for it...    I am wanting to do my first build, from a blank,   if I  mess it up, I'm not out anything was my thinking.  but now I wondering what other kind of challenges await me besides it being my first build?
Should I save it for a build down the road, or just roll with it and see how it comes out

The first thing I recommend is to determin how bad the twist is - if it is REAL bad then skip it and buy a better one especially if this is your first build from a blank. If the twist is minor - say under 1/4" over the length of the stock and the blank is thick enough then you can plane it flat or run one face through a jointer then a surface planer for the other face then square up the side where the barrel will go. If your blank is not square to begin with you WILL be fighting it all the way and most likely end up with a VERY poor fitting & looking rifle.

What is you decision on that twisted blank - we have not heard and I am curious?  Did you measure the twist - how much is it - again curious? Is the blank stable - i.e. been around the shop & kept dry for a LONG time -- again curious? I am just starting a half stock and the wood I chose has a SLIGHT twist - about 3/16" or so over it's length. I used a hand plane to get the high spots down then ran it through my jointer on three faces and now it is perfectly square. This piece of wood has been inside my closet in my house for at least 10 years - it is where I keep ALL my stock wood. Some from as far back as 1974.

[mupperm]

not decided  yet,  looks like it may be a future project,  I have Bruce have a look at it and we will go from there.