Good eveving. That's my 5th Long Branch No.4 mkI*. She shoots well , after patching sear lugs and knox form area. I want to build a real shooter.. So i want to use epoxy resin people use to protect wooden boat. Wood will bee unaffected from moisture and weather alterations. Before paint with epoxy, i have to remove oil and raw linseed oil that penetred onto wood. How to do it?
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3) So wash the wood surface with acetone. BUT DO IT OUTDOORS !!!! Health and fire hazard !!!!
4) You will not be able to remove all the oil from the wood - and that is probably a good thing. If you did remove all the oil, the wood would soak up moisture from the environment as soon as you took the rifle outdoors.
5) If you want to protect the wood from the weather and moisture, then you must treat the inside surfaces as well as the outside.
6) The first coat of epoxy varnish should not be painted on, but rubbed in lightly with a cloth pad. This is a light sealing layer to fill the pores of the wood. When this layer has not just dried, but hardened, rub it down with fine wire wool. Then you can paint on the varnish topcoat. But only apply a thin layer - if the varnish runs, the thicker patches will look awful.
7) This process is irreversible. Are you really, really sure you want to do it? Millions of Enfields went through two world wars in climates varying from the mud of the Flanders trenches through the desert of North Africa to the Burmese jungle. They were not varnished, but oiled. In extreme conditions - like salt water environments - it is the metal that suffers first, not the wood. Conditions that will ruin the wood will probably ruin the barrel even faster.
Last edited by Patrick Chadwick; 12-10-2012 at 07:10 PM.
Thank you for this clear explanations. Do you think linseed oil give to fore end wood a better protection than epoxy? I know RLO was used for a century with great success all the enviroments. But... using epoxy i can harden the wood using modern restoring tecnique..probably. Is it a waste of time and money?
The idea of epoxy penetration is a myth. It is essentially a surface treatment that may have some incidental penetration but certainly nothing like 1mm. The idea of hardening the wood simply won't work. What it does allow you is to get a superior bond between timber and timber, or timber and filler(where the filler itself is epoxy). A heavily oiled stock could be prepared for an epoxy treatment with acetone, or MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone), and you might get a good bond, but the timber may well be too contaminated to get a good bond. I certainly wouldn't do big areas.
But... using epoxy i can harden the wood using modern restoring tecnique..probably. Is it a waste of time and money?
Basically, tbonesmith has given you the answer. Yes, I fear it is a waste of time and money. "Been there, done that" - I too had the idea that one could harden up wood by impregnating it with a suitable epoxy-like substance. I was thinking, as maybe you were too, of archaeological restorations, such as the hull of the Mary Rose.
Well, apart from the slight problem that the kind of treatment used on such artefacts takes years for completion, it turns out not to be a hardening as we would understand it in the sense of providing a usable tool (or ship) again. It is rather a matter of slowly replacing the water - in decayed wood or other fibrous materials that would fall to pieces if they were to dry out - by a liquid that slowly becomes firmer (if I use the word harder, it only means harder by comparison with,say, cotton wool!) over a very lengthy period. To save my fingers, look up "Paraloid B72" and read the details.
This kind of liquid - an Ethyl-Methacrylat Copolymer - will stop your prehistoric boat or piece of cloth from crumbling, but it will not give you back a hard piece of wood that you can handle and take out in the rain! At least, that is my understanding, and I would be glad to be proved wrong. I got some of this stuff from a restorer and tried it out. Its gluing strength is and hardness is feeble. It is, however, supposed to be an effective sealing agent. Epoxy resins will provide the strength - but as tbonesmith has pointed out, they will not penetrate the wood to a useful extent.
Believe me, if I knew the answer, or someone else can reveal it, I would have used it and could tell everyone about it. The obvious application is for old gunstocks that have suffered from woodworm or rot. My Mauser 1871 (which has been shown previously in the Restorers forum) has BOTH defects, and as amusing as it is to see how well the old wreck still shoots, the stock is close to disintegration.
So if someone does have the answer - please tell us!
---------- Post added at 10:24 PM ---------- Previous post was at 10:14 PM ----------
Originally Posted by tbonesmith
MEK (Methyl Ethyl Ketone),
I had thought of MEK, which is an wickedly effective plastics solvent I use for model railroading, but I find it even more objectionable to use than acetone.
Last edited by Patrick Chadwick; 12-12-2012 at 04:20 PM.
The one example of epoxy impregnated non-laminated stocks of which I'm aware is the US M21. Done under pressure to new unfinished stocks before final bedding. Apparently done by one small shop and the secrets of manufacture seem largely lost.
Resin impregnation by infusion or RTM is a different ballgame, but it would be impossible without the timber being new and without substantial equipment, experience and skill. I'm not sure how much penetration they get, but at the end of the day, if the wood is good dense Walnut or something, how much air is there in to be displaced, and what % of that are you going to access. Timber seems pretty "closed cell" to me. Quality timber sits on the bottom of lakes, rivers and oceans for decades, and is often not water logged when it is recovered.
Here he use "Wood Hardener" but in archaeological restorations people uses paraloid. The real problem here is how to get vacuum avoiding explosion in my garage...
Second idea: doing what people restoring old wood boats does: low humidity on wood obtained with heat, and then they apply resin. Virtually no moisture exchange is possible with environment. In addition, the do small holes in keyb points locate in the wood and fill them with epoxy. Rhey say wood strenght will increase doing this.. But..all in all. Probably old RLO will work fine today, also
that penetred onto wood. How to do it?
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Originally Posted by bow
