CVA - What Wood?

[Craig Wilcox]

Recently acquired a CVA kit, and have been having fun with it.

This kit is from 1979, and remarkably, most all the parts-pieces are there.  Couple small items, but easy to take care of.  Even came with TWO barrels, a .50 and a.54.  More on those in a bit.  For a 40-year old kit, it's OK.

I have NO idea what kind of wood this is on the Hawken stock.  I'll try to add a picture.  The wood does NOT cut well, it like to splinter or split.  Using a file or scraper, saw, sandpaper it does fine, but if a chisel is within sight, the wood will start to split out.  So far, no mishaps though.  So one of the big questions is what wood did CVA chose to pre-shape/inlet on the Hawken?

So I started to finish the inletting on the .54 barrel.  Made in Spain, it had been "sanded" with about 40 grit stuff.  Some 180 and 220, it started looking good, and I finished up with 320.  Did a LOT of scraping on the barrel channel, and finally got the barrel inletted well.  Nose cap - well, almost done with that.

So, I sez, let us see how it looks with the .50 barrel!  Much to my surprise, it fit like a small hand in Daddy's glove!  Turns out that the .54 barrel is 1.00" across the flats, while the .50  barrel is only 0.9375, or 15/16" !!!

There is also only ONE barrel lug, and of course, only one key.  That's not a big deal, I can always make a dovetail barrel lug.  And with only one stock, you only need one key.

I'm going to progress on this "Hawken", maybe embellish a bit with some silver wire or something.  But, I AM going to be in the market for a Hawken stock, only this one with a 15/16" barrel channel.

I would really appreciate it if one of you can identify the wood.  Fairly soft, tan with dark little dashes through it, almost like Morse code.

Appreciate the help!


virtual toss

[axelp]

Beech

[Craig Wilcox]

Thanks, Ken.  Thought that might be it, wasn't positive.  Horrible stock wood!  Or at least this piece is.

[trailerpark]

I think those kits used wood from Japan.

[Daryl]

Stained Beech is a very common wood for air rifles as well.

[Mike Brooks]

I have built a lot of guns using  beech. All I have used has been pretty good stuff. Usually harder than walnut. I doubt Japan has any wood available for export.

[Bob Roller]

I always heard these 70's kit guns were pine and remember
references to brass and pine rifles..

Bob Roller

[Craig Wilcox]

Bob, I kinda wish it were pine - at least pine you can chisel!

I will have to get another stock for the 15/16", .50 cal barrel.  No way I can put a smaller barrel I that 1" channel.  You can bet it is going to be walnut or maple, probably the maple.  Of course, that also means another lock, tang, barrel lug and wedge, butt plate, and patch box.  Yikes!

It is fun though, having a stock and barrel that I can most of the work on while sitting.  I have a bit more wood to rasp off the fore end, as I finally got that muzzle cap fitted on.

Not too much cussing while working on the kit - just a bare modicum!

Appreciate all the responses.  Only wood I ever got from Japan was pear wood, when I was making golf clubs for Toney Penna decades ago.

[T*O*F]

A discussion many years ago concluded that it was from the Plane tree (European sycamore).  The plane tree has been discussed here recently.

[Mike Lyons]

Dark leather dye will normally take the fish scales out of beech and make it look similar to walnut or stay splotchy and look kinda like birch.  Lots of the Surplus rifles from Greece were restocked with beech.   

[Craig Wilcox]

Thanks, Dave and Mike.
I tried some stains in the barrel channel, the Honey Maple (LMF) looks great.  But now I am going to try a small place with aqua fortis, then the stain.  Not too sure how the AF will react in that beech wood.
Had everything all together this afternoon, if I had some .530 balls, I would have tried it out.

[Fifty Four]

Hi all. New guy here.  I've used aquafortis on Beech and it came out a nice dark brown.  Hides the fishscales (I call them "toenails") pretty well, too.

[Daryl]

Weirhauch in Germany uses a dark stain - hides the marks well.

[bgf]

I doubt the Spanish imported wood from Japan !  Most likely European beech (what's usually on European air-rifles) or Eurpean Sycamore.  Some very old CVA kits actually had maple stocks, but that didn't last long and not on the ones with Spanish proofs on the barrels.  Whatever wood it is, you may be struggling with the fact that it has dried out a lot!  It's been a decade since my last beech stock, but I remember it was prone to mashing while in letting rather than cutting cleanly like maple.  Could have been my inexperience also, but I still remember being quite pleased with hard maple in contrast.

The alcohol stains work well on it, but I thought the oil stains were a royal pain!  I first came to my love of tinted fish with these also!  Most important when I turned a two piece stock from different trees into a one piece stock .

Mirokus were the ones from Japan and I think they suffered a lot more from cultural translation -- both in aesthetics and function.  They still build some very nice shotguns, but their "longrifles" make CVAs look like CLA display pieces.

[hudson]

I put together an early kit and that wood was hard. I am thinking maple, aqua fortis used with good results.

[Craig Wilcox]

I have been finding that scrapers work a lot better than chisels or sandpaper, and you can accurately take off a lot of wood fairly quickly scraping.  I cut some scrapers for size, and they do right well.
Mike Brooks has claimed this many times, but I was too stubborn to give up my chisels and sandpaper.  I was WRONG!
The thinner (0.015") scrapers are easiest for me to work with.

[oldtravler61]

  We always called the wood. River bottom walnut. Because it should have stayed there.  Oldtravler

[Daryl]

LOL  - tks for that Oldtraveller - I needed a chuckle.

[T*O*F]

We always called the wood. River bottom walnut. Because it should have stayed there.

Actually not funny.  Some of the best wood is that which has spent its life under water.  There are guys making good money recovering and selling it.  Some is over a century old and still in perfect condition.  It goes for big bucks.

[Mike Lyons]

We always called the wood. River bottom walnut. Because it should have stayed there.

Actually not funny.  Some of the best wood is that which has spent its life under water.  There are guys making good money recovering and selling it.  Some is over a century old and still in perfect condition.  It goes for big bucks.

Im wrong a lot but I don’t think they are diving, risking their lives for century old water logged beech? 

[Craig Wilcox]

Actually, Mike, they do dive for it.  At least in the several operations in Florida.  Couple on the St. John's, and two on the Swanee.
They are mainly after cypress and yellow pine that was logged back towards the end of the 19th century, and use SCUBA gear to find the logs and attach a line for pulling it up.

[oldtravler61]

  Some guy's have no since of humor...   Oldtravler

[oldtravler61]

   How about just calling it an ole stick in the mud....  Oldtravler

[Daryl]

Actually, Mike, they do dive for it.  At least in the several operations in Florida.  Couple on the St. John's, and two on the Swanee.
They are mainly after cypress and yellow pine that was logged back towards the end of the 19th century, and use SCUBA gear to find the logs and attach a line for pulling it up.

We have an area, West and South of here where submerged, dam-flooded timber was logged - Pine and Spruce.
I suspect it is used mostly for chips and/or pulp for the paper industry.  The government gave them a break on the stumpage
and because of that, it became profitable.

[T*O*F]

There was a huge operation in the NW corner of Lake Superior where they discovered rafts of logs that had broken up on the trip to the sawmill.  All huge, old growth logs that had sunk in the cold depths of the lake.

I also remember reading of a period gunmaker who stated that the best walnut came from sunken snags in the Mississippi and Missouri rivers.  When wood is kiln or air dried, the moisture in the cells is removed fairly rapidly and the cells collapse.  This causes the shrinkage and splitting.  When wood is submerged, the water in the cells slowly migrates into the phloem and xylem, but the wood remains stable and dense.  When pulled from the water, the wood contains intercellular moisture, not intracellular moisture.