sugar vs red maple

[BigBoreBLR]

Whats the difference?

 

[galamb]

Sugar Maple (a type of "hard" Maple) is a little harder and heavier (in general).

Red Maple (a type of "soft" Maple) is a little softer and lighter (again in general).

You can find some Red that is harder than some Sugar.

There are other types of Maple (ie. Silver) which are less suited for building gun stocks with.

When they are finished you can not tell the difference.

When they are simply a "board" 99.5% of wood dealers can not tell the difference unless they are looked at, at the cellular level.

Red Maple is "plenty HARD".

Some say Sugar carves better - I have always found it "chippy" - prefer to work with Red (and use it exclusively now).

Curl or tiger stripes occur naturally in about 1% of Sugar Maple trees and about 10% of Red Maples.

So rarity = cost = curly Red is somewhat less expensive than curly Sugar.

 

[BigBoreBLR]

For now, I was planning on using $75 red maple grade 1 blanks, maybe grade 2.

Making a poor boy rifle.

However, besides looks, is there any advantage to using curly maple.

Also, the grain alignment at the wrist, whats good or bad to look for.

As per recommendation on another post, I was going to order from track the wolf, seems the price is right. So, I am ordering on a leap of faith and not hand selecting their wood.

I will be going to a gun builders fair this summer, so I will pick out the pretty boy ohio squirrel gun I plan on building adter the poor boy.

However, the ohio gun will likely be walnut.

 

[Herb]

A Poor Boy was an inexpensive rifle and plain wood is more correct for it. You want the grain to flow down through the wrist for strength. Preferably not parallel to the bore and certainly not running uphill toward the top of the butt, for that grain is more easily broken. See a picture of GRRW's Poor Boy on the nearby post about Hawken building.

 

[Birddog6]

You want the grain to look like this. So there is no grain runout at the wrist. This is a piece of curly Ash, but makes no dif. if maple, ash, walnut. Forget the curl in this (if you can :rotf: ) and look at the curve in the grain.




Keith Lisle

 

[galamb]

That's a horrible piece of wood there Keith.

You should send it to me and I'll dispose of it in my fire pit - no charge :grin:

 

[BigBoreBLR]

So, the percent curly they speak of in wood grading relates primarily to the wrist in the stock area. It curves with the wood.

So, a grade 1 is basically a straight piece of wood.

 

[jamesthomas]

No the "curl" is the amount of striping the piece of wood has. See those vertical lines? the closer together they are the more % of curl the piece of wood has. That's probably a high grade #6, or a grade #7 piece of Ash Keith has.

 

[galamb]

No, the two things are not really related.

There is a number of "grades" of curly maple (or any curly wood).

The lower grades go all the way from "no curl" to maybe 30% curl over the entire blank (or curl only in the butt area etc)

Some grade it all the way up to "7" and then have a "presentation" grade.

So looking at that piece that Keith posted up I would suspect it would "minimally" be sold as a grade 6 depending on what the rest of the blank looks like.

So that "grading" is simply talking about the quality of the stripes, how prolific they are, how tight they are to one another etc.

You can have a CM7 (grade 7 curly maple) chunk of wood that is "totally unsuitable" for building a rifle with.

The "grain" is the horizontal lines you see in that pic.

What you are looking for is to find a blank where those horizontal lines run as parallel to the profile of the wrist as possible.

The "impact strength" of the wood is strongest "parallel" to those lines. So you want to absorb the recoil along those lines.

If those "lines" run out (don't follow the wrist), you could develop a crack, over time, because the recoil is not "flowing" all the way back to the butt.

 

[stuartg]

Excellent response!

Thanks for sharing Graham! I was always curious about grain run out, but that pretty much answers everything :thumbsup:

 

[dant]

You might check Pecatonica River gun stocks, they supply TOW with some stocks. I think their shipping costs are lower.

 

[BigBoreBLR]

Has anyone bought blanks from track the wolf.

I am very far from a muzzleloading shop. Maybe 1 hour away from the PA border. My wife is tempted to bring me to Kempton next month for a vacation of sorts.

I feel brave enough to widdle a stock on my first build. The couch, bedroom set, daughter's feeding high chair, and other items have survived several years so far.

The book building the PA longrifle just came in today from Dixon's. Likely the first of many orders from there.

 

[galamb]

I am very far from a muzzleloading shop. Maybe 1 hour away from the PA border. My wife is tempted to bring me to Kempton next month for a vacation of sorts.

I'm 5 1/2 hours from Dixons - worth the trip. They usually have a number of good quality blanks, along with everything else you could possibly ever want.

Depending on which direction you are an hour away from there is also another shop in Chambersburg, PA (Fort Chambers) - somewhat less than Dixons, but still a good pile of "stuff".

 

[jerrywh]

I have found some pretty hard red maple and made some very nice rifles out of it but it never holds up like good hard eastern or sugar maple.
Some red maple is very beautiful and hard to resist but I would prefer good hard eastern maple.