Using Purple Heart Plank for Custom Gunstock??
- Thread starter The Kurgan
- Start date
Yeah, bubinga is a beautiful wood too, it's dense and finely straight-grained. The grain pattern is meh, but the color is beautiful. Also, it's highly resilient. I have had 3 practice swords made out of it and none of them broke or even badly dented under hard (ab)use.
Purple heart has resins in it and super fine fibres that come off of it as you work it that are highly irritating and possibly allergenic.
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It's possible to develop an allergy to tropical hardwoods, so working with them it's advisable to be serious about dust control and not inhaling quantities of that.
A friend of mine mentioned that he makes ebony-looking pieces with good old Canadian maple dyed with black/sepia ink.
A friend of mine mentioned that he makes ebony-looking pieces with good old Canadian maple dyed with black/sepia ink.
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- Steel Town and The Peg
Some nice ideas on that list !
I have 2 slabs of bocote for gun stocks..it's so heavy, like way to heavy unless you want a heavy rifles to help with recoil.
Yeah that's another downside to using it. I'm not too concerned with the extra weight as I would be slimming down the stock as much as possible but it definitely is a heavy wood.
Do you think it's heavier than a laminate would be?
Bocote is 50 pounds per cubic foot
It's definitely not the heaviest though. The top ten heaviest woods are over 75 pounds a cubic foot.
Depending on the dryness the purple heart wood would weight more then bocote 99% of the time
It's 50-60 pounds per cubic foot
Google tells me a cubic food dried walnut is 38 pounds and laminate gun stock would be 42 pounds and the bocote is 50 pounds.I was going to use it on a little short carbine chambered in 6.5x53r but wanted the gun to weigh 6 pounds. If I was building an 8 pound rifle or a full sized rifle I'd use it no problem. It's solid feeling.
It's definitely not the heaviest though. The top ten heaviest woods are over 75 pounds a cubic foot.
Depending on the dryness the purple heart wood would weight more then bocote 99% of the time
It's 50-60 pounds per cubic foot
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Great idea. It will be a family heirloom.
There must be a reason why walnut has been favoured for all those years. Combination of weight to strength ratio, shock absorption perhaps, figures is one of them for sure. Not all walnut are the same of course, American black walnut is not really exciting compare to some other species but it is used none the less.
Maple have been used quite a bit but the rock/sugar maple, I think they use a softer maple with lots of figures that is not really found in sugar maple. Beech wood in Europe has been used to and of course birch.
I think a wood that is really hard/dense and brittle would transfer more recoil maybe?
Maple have been used quite a bit but the rock/sugar maple, I think they use a softer maple with lots of figures that is not really found in sugar maple. Beech wood in Europe has been used to and of course birch.
I think a wood that is really hard/dense and brittle would transfer more recoil maybe?
One reason is that it's relatively easy to work with, particularly Juglans Regia, the so-called English, French or Circassian walnut (it's all the same wood, the name just varies depending on the region in which it's grown). It's easy to cut with a chisel, and it takes checkering very well, without an propensity for the diamonds to break off. American black walnut is a little coarser, and usually not as well figured.
