To restore Stock or leave alone?
Collectors please help. I have an original WRA stock on my correct WRA M1. The Stock is in over all reasonable condition for its age. It does however have a number of dings, scrapes and gouges, most, if not all of which could be repaired. My dilemma is, should I refurbish this stock or just oil it and leave it alone? Other Milsurp collector sites seem to consider these usage marks part of a rifles history and consider refurbishing beyond oiling a cardinal sin. What say you? Thanks in advance for your responses.
It is a very difficult question.
This is a difficult question but I am enthused at the asking. We as a group have for quite some time frowned upon the refinishing of metal but have refinished wood willy-nilly - trying to question that mindset in small ways has gotten me into hot water in the past but I am very pleased to see that this is becoming more of an issue. That means that either opinions are changing and there is a shift in thinking, or that we are simply running out of the rattiest of old stocks that clearly need refinishing :D. Either way it has been a subject of some concern to for quite some time.
In our old mindset, I likened it to Corvette owners that so covetted perfection in what they owned that they endlessly restored their cars, but in their zeal to restore had lost any hint of what the car was when originally produced, and I worried that we had gone too far down that road already. Perhaps applicable is the antiques world where prices are often stratospheric (regardless of the economy) - where the prices make it worth the effort to make perfect fakes - and the only way remaining for the experts to tell real from reproduced is that aged finish which adds exponentially to the value (though as I wrote in the GCA Journal once about antique duck decoys that had their finish artificially aged, even that is not infallible ...).
Perhaps such things are worth considering and perhaps they aren't, but the question becomes; why do you do this - collect - what is it that you seek? If these are mere investments then all such things are considerations with regard to how much the item will be worth when you sell it (...). But if you do this for other, less tangible reasons, then there are other things to consider such as when those old finishes may have been applied, and where the dirt may have come from when those dirty coats underneath were laid down, and what may have caused the dings and dents and even the odd chip or crack. It is history and these are steeped in it - indeed, they were at one time the catalyst for it. Or you may be more in tune with the cultural history of the times and the character that it took to create that weapon - what we as a culture had to have been (and are not now) in order to put such a weapon into some very scared, or cold, or hot, or tired hands anywhere on the globe, where it was only the magnificence of the character of the hands in which it was held and the magnificence of the weapon that we gave those hands that allowed it to emerge, perhaps not unscathed, from some of the most dire of times and places. All are valid considerations when one handles a Garand; when you touch an old finish and shakes hands by proxy with those great hands that came before us - a person can definitely be humbled when such things are taken into consideration.
Or perhaps the marks just came from it being dropped in the arms room, ... I don't know ...
Like I said, it is a very difficult question.
