How badly is it warped?
I’m not meaning to disagree with the success the other guys have found with wet heat, but I wanted to comment that it’s not always necessary to soak the wood or use steam. This is especially true with thin wood. It’s not the hot water that makes the wood pliable. It’s the heat softening a compound in the wood called “lignin”. (
https://www.britannica.com/science/lignin ) It softens when heated, and then stiffens again when it cools. So just like you do not need to soak a ramrod in order to straighten it (it can be straightened with dry heat only), you can usually also straighten a stock with dry heat. (Shot gun wrists on finished firearms are also bent dry, using hot linseed oil poured over them to provide heat.)
Of course the wet methods work. I think the main benefit to the dry method is a bit more control. In concept, if you had to soak it first, then in principle it may warp again as it dries out again. But if you bend it with dry heat, then when it cools it stays set. The other obvious benefit is that it is ready to work immediately after it cools. If you soak it, then you may want to wait a few more weeks before messing with it, to see if it shifts as it dries. But of course how long you wait would be up to you. And as I said above, I’m not meaning to contest in any way the success people have had with other methods.
Here’s a great vid on bending wood strips with heat that will explain what I’m talking about with dry heat.
I recently used dry heat to straighten a stock that was warped in the muzzle area, just like yours is warped. This was on a blank, after the barrel inlet, but before it was fully shaped. (This was not a precarve). The warp was about 6” from the end, and had shifted a little more than 3/32” to the left when I left the barrel out of the channel (for an unavoidable reason, but obviously for too long a time). To straighten it I clamped a 3’x 2”x2” piece of red oak to the left side, and then pushed a long tapered shim in from the end so as to bend the warped end back in the direction I needed it to go. I pushed it very slightly past straight, so basically I moved it about 1/8” total. This was all done cold. Then I added heat to it for about 20 minutues, moving the heat so as to avoid scorching the stock. I used a heat gun for this, set on about 400 degrees. That is way hotter than is necessary, but this was on a blank and the sides were still more than a ¼” thick. The point is to get the wood warmed up all the way in there.
With this piece I wasn’t concerned about breaking it. So, as I mentioned, I set it up cold and then added heat. If I had been concerned about it breaking, I think I would have added heat before pushing the wedge into place, and then added some more after that.
You want to be careful not to get it too hot or to keep it hot for too long. If it starts to change color and look like a roasted brown marshmallow, it is way too hot. You don’t want to bake it brown. That causes a state called torrefaction (you can read about it here:
https://cfpwoods.com/2016/08/26/what-is-torrefied-wood/ ), which is basically the first step in turning wood into charcoal. Torrefied wood is very stable, but it can also be brittle. You don’t want your stock (or a ramrod) to be baked brown and made brittle. Browning it like that won’t ruin the stock, but if you bake it like that, the brown color is not just on the surface. It will go deep in the wood, and it may be deeper than you can remove just with scraping or sanding, and it can affect the color in that area when you stain it.
Revised, 1/11/25, 5:54 EST: Removed comment about how hot the temp needs to be. Just read on the web that the softening temps of woods vary by species. Have no idea what actual temp is required for maple.
