So the way I am reading what you have posted is to carry on rubbing more oil in and forget wet sanding as with the stain I put on it may get splotchy if I sand through the stain. Also, that the poly oil straight is faster then pure tung and that poly mixed with the stock conditioner is faster yet. Is this all correct?
You are sort of combining a bunch of ideas here that you should not. If by "stock conditioner" you're referring to that BC Stock Sheen product, you definitely do not want to mix that with tung oil - you'll contaminate your finish with abrasive grit and wax. Stop worrying so much about "faster." Pick the finish you want, and observe the curing/drying time for the products you've chosen. If you want the fastest finish, you've already found it with your Tru-oil
I haven't read back through all the replies, but we've heard about sealers, fillers, oil finishes like tung & linseed, polyurethane finishes, and waxes, as well as "conditioner," sandpaper, abrasives (e.g. rouge & rottenstone,) scrapers, etc.
These things are used or applied in stages - you don't polish the wood first, then apply the finish, then apply something like sanding sealer, etc. They go on in a specific order. There's a lot of mythology and voodoo around some of this stuff, which is why manufacturers can market & sell the way they do -- you end-up not quite sure what you need to buy, or even quite what you've got once you've bought it. I'm going to describe these things in the order in which they're applied, starting with the wood.
Wood
You have a "Ross rifle stock" which I assume is walnut since that is what you've been using for your tests. Walnut has very open grain compared with most other species. About the only things that are in common/traditional use that are more "open" are oak and ash. That means that if you simply apply your $20/oz Uncle McProfessor's Miracle Bee Oil and All-in-One Farrier Balm to your piece of walnut, it's going to look from 3 feet away like a human nose does under high magnification, pores & shiny spots and all - the sort of thing that will make you say "I've tried, and I just cant get that elusive sheen." To get walnut looking good, you have to do something about
all (ALL) of those pores.
Sealer
Remember, I'm going in order. If you were going to apply a sealer, (and you should not,) you'd generally do so here, as the first step. For a gun stock that in your dreams is going to come out like sean69's beautiful result, you can skip this step. Sanding sealers are a waxy substance something like soap. They're intended for high-production environments, to keep paper from clogging and help it cut better. They also inhibit the bond of the finish to the wood,
and they dull and obscure the subtle lovely bits of flashy flecky things in the wood that you'd rather see. You wouldn't paint a bar of soap, you can't see through a bar of soap, and you can afford a few extra sheets of paper, so forget about sealers. The finish you choose to use will be all the "sealer" you need. (This is as good a point as any to point out that "more" products is not "better." You don't want a melange of sealers/finishes that are in effect laminations. Doing so invites integrity and adhesion issues. Skip the sealers and conditioners.)
Filler
You definitely need this. If you don't fill the pores in your stock, it's going to come out looking like every $h!tty-looking Tru-oil job you've ever seen photos of posted online. Filler takes one of two forms that have already been described. You can either buy a commercial filler, or you can "wet sand" your first several coats, to combine walnut sanding dust with oil, which will form a slurry and fill your pores once it's (eventually) dried. The advantage to this approach is that there's nothing to buy, and no decision to make. The disadvantage is that the resulting "cosmetics," while safe, are unlikely to be dramatic, and it won't dry as fast.
Commercial filler comes in colors, and dries faster and harder than oil & sanding dust. Once it's been applied and sanded, you can start applying your finish, and relatively quickly see the elusive "sheen" begin to appear. The big advantage to using a colored filler is that it can drastically increase the drama/wow-factor of your wood. When you see a stock with black streaks of feather/crotch/burl in the butt, that's dark-colored filler. It should come as no surprise that the wood was mostly a uniform color when the tree was first cut open, despite the convoluted grain. The high contrast in the finished stock is due to colored filer in the pores, which in walnut, vary in terms of their size and number across different places in the piece of wood. So the bits with lots of pores, as where end grain is exposed, will look darker than the part that's all face grain. One color of filler vs another can mean a very drastic change in the finished appearance of an open-grained wood like walnut. Some guys will use red filler to very good effect. Pick the wrong color, and it's going to look "stupid," e.g. red on a piece of white oak, or blonde on a piece of dark walnut.
If you take the wet-sanding route, you're going to have less of this "drama," because your filler is made from the stock itself, and is precisely the same color. That might be a good thing, on something like an inexpensive sporter stock for an old military action that wasn't sold as "AAA grade" and that has one weird burl somewhere that would look like a black blotch against an otherwise very plain-looking stock if you used dark brown filler.
You
definitely want to fill your walnut stock. Whether you use wet-sanding dust or a colored filler is up to you, but you mustn't skip this step. If it's an expensive "AAA" stock, I'd lean toward a contrasting color. For walnut, this usually means either a medium- or dark-brown, or "French red." For a plain piece of walnut, wet sanding, or else a closely-matched medium-brown commercial filler might be better.
It might take two coats to get everything filled, or you might get away with one. I guess I have failed to mention --
you must sand the filler back down. This is done "dry," even if you took the wet-sanding approach. The idea is to fill the pores, let everything dry, and then sand it back so that the filler is "flush" with the tops of the capillaries that are the pores.
Check your work with water from the faucet. Once your pores are filled, and everything is smooth, and you don't have any errant blobs or smears of filler lingering anywhere, you can move on to the finish.
Finish
We've heard about two types -- oil, and poly -- and they are two very different things. "Oil-based polyurethane" is not really similar in any way to a tung or linseed oil finish. About the only thing they have in-common is that they have "oil" in their name. Well, that, and the fact that they both contain oil, but not for long.
Polyurethane comes in a bunch of different types, but the most common are the water- and oil-based. Water-based is great for refinishing your bedroom floor when you want to sleep in the room the same night, or if you run a furniture factory and the environmentalists are after you, but it doesn't have any advantages over oil-based poly for gun stocks, except maybe that it's faster-drying, so let's forget about about water-based poly.
Oil-based poly is a product made from (usually) some plant oil and a second component that combine to form polyurethane (yes, the plastic,) when they're exposed to air. You can go online and read about the various oils and chemicals used if you want, but the result is always polyurethane, even if the name of the product is "Earth's Own Natural Essential Hemlock Oil (now with poly)." It's polyurethane, the same thing used to make foam seat cushions, dog collars, gaskets, etc. Uncle McProfessor has not figured out how to make a hybrid oil/poly finish. Once it's cured, the oil is gone - it gets combined with the other component in the product and converted into plastic.
When it's formulated as a wood finish, it cures to some degree of hardness that will vary across specific products/brands/applications, but they're all going to be in roughly the same ballpark, so don't worry too much about it. Poly dries very hard, very quickly. Floors freshly finished can be walked-on in 24 hrs. Once it's fully cured after a few days, you can walk on it in muddy, dirty shoes and not leave a mark. It is very, very durable, water and chemical resistant, etc. It is intended to result in a finish with film thickness that can be measured, e.g. in "mils." It lays on the surface, not so much "in" it, as with linseed oil.
Traditional oil finishes are a different thing. Whether linseed or tung, or "Danish" oil (which is usually linseed and/or tung) they work by first penetrating the wood, and then drying, gelling, and hardening. They don't turn into plastic - they turn into dried out, hardened oil. Eventually, when you put on enough thin coats, a very thin film will form, but not to the degree or in the same way as with poly. As an aside here, I will say that my favorite finish for gun stocks is straight, unthinned "Hope's Tung Oil," the stuff in the green and white plastic bottle. It's cheap, dries quickly, and builds fast. It's not as fast-drying as Tru-oil (which I have used once, to good effect) but it's like 1/4 the price. Using Hope's, I have gotten a finish as fine and as smooth as can be had, I promise you, using nothing but sandpaper. But it takes lots of coats.
As has already been discussed, the application of an oil finish is time-consuming, compared to applying poly with a foam brush.
I'm not leaving out any "secret" details. The trick is to apply lots of thin coats, taking care to get/keep everything levelled between coats. In my method, this means (barely) knocking back with 1500 or 2000 wet/dry paper every third coat or so. We're not filling pores any more, at this stage, so no more oil/dust slurry. Just wet/dry paper, and water as needed, and wipe clean afterward. If you have the mad skilz of sean69, you can get glorious results using scrapers, as we have seen. I wouldn't know much about that. But you apply a coat, let it dry, sand out any imperfections, decide whether you're done or not, and if not, repeat. If you continue in this way, you'll eventually arrive at a finish that is as subtly frosted glass. It's practically unavoidable.
So-called "Conditioner"
The thing about polyurethane finishes is that they are all "high gloss" in their basic, unadulterated form. When you see "satin" and "flat" on the can at the store, they've added deglossing agents to dull the skin's sheen to some degree, that may or may not be your ideal "hand-rubbed oil finish" sheen.
I wouldn't have known what BC "Stock Sheen" was, unless I'd read about it in this thread. It appears to be a combination abrasive/polish and wax. Sounds like it might be just the thing for a
polyurethane finish that is too glossy, for simulating the "hand-rubbed" sheen. Of course, you can get a similar effect with fine steel wool, abrasive polish (like 3M "heavy cut" buffing compound, etc,) or very fine wet/dry paper. Or you can try this stuff. I bet it works great. Still, you don't need it for an oil finish, and probably should not be hitting your lovingly-applied oil finish with mystery abrasives and solvents.
The other component of the BC Stock Sheen is wax.
Wax
You wax your stock for the same reason you (might) wax a car, and you should not be thinking about using wax as part of the process of finishing your stock, any more than you'd think of using wax as part of the process of painting a car.
In the days when cars were finished with nitro and then acrylic lacquer, wax protected the finish, and so too the steel underneath. It won't really do anything at all on top of a polyurethane finish except maybe impart a bit of shine (that will quickly rub right off) but it won't hurt, either. The same is true for oil finishes, except that an oil finish is liable to have some very fine imperfections that will be present, and so the wax will help protect & "waterproof" the tiny little invisible bits of exposed wood.
All of that having been written -
My father was in the furniture business for many years. I worked for him from the time I was a kid until I was in my late 20s. I got to see a lot of what works,and what doesn't. I have kept up down through the years by doing all of my own finish work - everything from oak floors to pistol grips, vintage speaker cabinets, and furniture, just like lots of other people. I have found that over the years, the quality and consistency of the basic products in the industry have mostly only improved -- there's been lots of industry consolidation. That doesn't stop snake-oil from creeping in, in the same way we see motorcycle fork oil being sold in perfume bottles at $12/oz as specialty gun lubricant, but it's easy to avoid. Just buy the standard stuff. In the Belgian attelier of our imagination, the white-haired guy with the eyeglass loupe and leather apron isn't finishing his stocks with products from little blue plastic bottles at $18/each. His supplies come from big, rusty, metal cans.
If that were my stock, and I were paying someone else to finish it, I would tell them to:
Run it under the kitchen faucet, to get an idea of what sort of grain we're dealing with. If it's plain, I'd either wet-sand it, or apply the most innocuous,color-matched filler I could find. If it's fancy, well, I knew that when I paid for it. I'd pick a filler with lots of contrast.
Decide how the gun will be used, and choose the finish. AAA-fancy safe queen? Has to be oil. Forklift-pallet-grade "hardwood?" Doesn't matter. Oil is easier to touch-up when the inevitable happens, but poly is quite a lot more durable.
Buying a collection of fancy boutique toiletries is not the way. Careful, deliberate work with fairly painstaking attention to detail
is the way. The products you need to buy are few, simple, and inexpensive. When you are done, and it is perfect, that might be the time to treat yourself to some expensive wax.
) is generally something you do to prepare your work to take a finish - the only thing I can think of that NEEDS it is a shellac finish (leveling).
