Original stock color of early M1s?

[ssgross]

If you want to prematurely age the look of the wood you can blend some stains together and match the color, however it’s difficult for raw linseed oil to penetrate oil based stains. An alcohol based stain is best. Waterbased might also be an option.

I have played around with blending stains. There are some expensive stains on brownells, and lots of posts and instructions online for using them to reproduce the right "military" color. In my experiments, these and other stains tend to put the color "on top" of the wood, and the grain gets lost when done, producing a washed out effect that makes the wood look like it was painted with watercolors.

I got the idea on this forum to start playing around with the traditional alkanet root. You can buy a jar of "organic alkanet root powder" it on Amazon for pretty cheap. Put 3 heaping tablespoons in an 8oz jar (like those tiny ones used for jelly), top off with denatured alcohol or turpentine. Shake it every day for a week. Then pour it through a coffee filter, or just let it sit so the powder becomes sediment. Wipe on. Using alcohol adds more color in fewer coats, but is tricky to apply evenly. Turpentine takes more coats, but is impossible to screw up. Your wood will dry with with pinkish hue. Then just use linseed oil or tung oil, or whatever finishing technique you prefer (ha! folks tend to cling to their methods like true religion). With the right sanding, I have gotten new wood to look like it was kept untouched in a warehouse for 100 years.

You can also skip the alkanet "stain", and top off your 8oz jar with 1:1 turpentine and raw linseed oil. Shake every day for several weeks - ideally for a month. This makes a traditional "red oil". To add more "age" to your stock, use your alkanet stain followed by your alkanet red oil. The beauty of alkanet, and why it was used for hundreds of years before, was because the color has a translucent complexity that you can't get with modern synthetic stains. The benefit and reason for using the latter is just simply time. You can also break with finish religion and use your alkanet with store-bought boiled linseed oil or tung oil to speed up the drying time. Buy some cheap test pieces and have fun with it, then create your own religion.

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