There was just alley enough between the Parker shotguns and the vise to admit visitors single-file – and so little standing room, three was in fact a crowd. But he welcomed an audience, spinning tales as, magically, he wrought magnificent sporting rifles from old metal and new wood. Glancing up from time to time to laugh, he’d keep to the task, spilling chips with practiced ease. He was Outdoor Life incarnate – its adventure stories by Ben East, shooting columns by Jack O’Connor. But his yarns were no one else’s. 

“Want to see some wood?” He’d wipe oil-dark hands on his shop apron and herd me across the basement to a nook stacked with stock blanks, a dusty queue of elite walnut waiting to board the bench. He’d pick one, a rub of saliva revealing a blush of color. “Old French. Good layout. Needs a 7x57.” Each stick had a persona he thought suited a specific rifle action or cartridge. 

Spokane gunmaker Al Biesen gained celebrity crafting rifles for O’Connor from the aged walnut in that Sinto Street basement. 

The physical advantages of fiberglass and carbon-fiber rifle stocks are clear. Still, the most expensive custom rifles wear walnut. And now, many hunters brought up on synthetic stocks are giving wood a second look. Walnut appeals in ways man-made materials don’t. One black polymer stock is just like the next, but no two sticks of walnut are the same. While color and unique patterns can be infused in or sprayed on synthetic materials, these stocks can’t duplicate the natural look and feel of walnut.

Sometime during the 13th century, Marco Polo is said to have brought walnuts from their native Persia to Italy. Nuts and seedlings found their way to northern Europe and England. While Juglans regia, or “royal walnut,” varies in grain structure and color by region, it carries that same scientific name world-wide. Common names reflect regions. English and French walnut are both J. regia. Much later, across the Atlantic, “California English” appeared. Grown from nuts, it produces tawny wood with dark streaks and less “marblecake” figure than England’s walnut. Classic French boasts an orange glow. Circassian walnut (after a region in the northwest Caucasus) has a smoky, shadowed character.

American or black walnut, J. nigra, graced elegant flintlock “Kentucky” rifles crafted by German gunmakers in Pennsylvania shops. Warm brown in color, with black venation, American walnut has big pores and is typically softer than its counterparts. Ruddy Claro walnut, J. hindsii, discovered in California about 1840, is also more open-pored than French or English walnut. Claro crossed with English produces Bastogne walnut. Its nuts are infertile, but Bastogne grows fast. Stock-makers like its tight, recoil-resistant grain, which checkers cleanly. Fetching color and figure have buoyed demand for, and prices of, Bastogne. As with J. regia, the best Bastogne comes from trees at least 150 years old.

To 19th-century rifle-makers, the supply of walnut in the U.S. must have seemed inexhaustible. But that illusion vanished with old-growth pine forests in the upper Midwest and virgin stands of spruce and redwoods in the Far West. Hungry saws ripped wood centuries in the making. Gun-makers held to walnut because it was reasonably hard, but lighter and easier to work than oak, and not as apt to shatter. It also had interesting figure and cozy color. Quilted maple was coveted but scarce. Its pallor begged stain. 

In my youth, $25 would buy a semi-inletted blank of pretty American walnut. I paid $7.50 for a plain blank from Herters, the Waseca, Minnesota mail-order company whose telephone-thick wish-books mesmerized lads of the ’60s. After a winter’s labor, the walnut I had not pared away still looked more like a stock blank than a stock. I installed it on a $30 Short Magazine Lee Enfield. Williams sights set me back another $10. My first deer rifle had come dear indeed! 

Since those days of 5-cent Snickers and 20-cent gasoline, walnut prices have tracked diminishing supplies. Cheaper woods like birch and beech gradually replaced walnut on entry-level rifles. Laminates also cut costs. While heavier than walnut, the best are stronger and more stable. Colorful stains add cosmetic appeal. Now laminate stocks appear on top-tier rifles. In their wake came stocks with figured walnut slabs sandwiching laminated cores.

Figure in walnut depends on the tree’s origin and age, and how it’s cut. Quarter-sawn walnut has tight color bands, as the saw crosses growth rings. Plane-sawed slabs have wider bands, because the saw runs tangent to those rings. Either cut can yield a strong, handsome stock, but tradition favors the quarter-sawn look. Two-piece blanks with fetching color and figure and perfect grip layout are easier to find than one-piece sticks, whose length doubles the odds of an unacceptable flaw.

Don Allen was a walnut guru. He crafted lovely gun stocks when he wasn’t piloting commercial airplanes. His custom work led Don and his wife Norma, with Oregon gun-maker Pete Grisel, to establish Dakota Arms in Sturgis, South Dakota. His Model 76 bolt rifle was essentially a pre-war M70 Winchester with better walnut, impeccably shaped and finished. Allen traveled the world to find fancy wood for the 76 and his lovely Model 10 single-shot. Forty years ago he told me walnut was disappearing fast. High-grade J. regia was already scarce in England and France. “Some trees being felled in Turkey may be 400 years old! We’re inletting wood that predates the American Revolution!” Planting trees hardly allayed concerns, as top-end walnut is the product of centuries.

Increasingly valuable, walnut is carefully processed. In France, fresh logs have been steamed to kill insects. “Steamed or not,” said Don, “walnut must be dried before it’s attacked with tools. Right after it’s cut, a blank releases water. Think of a soaked sponge dripping. But if water leaves too fast, the wood can crack and check, and even crust, inhibiting further release of bound water. A kiln controls drying, but all that’s needed to coax moisture out gently is a cool, shaded place, protected from extreme temperature and humidity. When moisture content stabilizes at around 20%, it’s ready to work. Some stockers rough-turn blanks at this point, then let them dry another six months.”

Shaping follows sketches of the stock’s final profile, to make the most of wood grain, color and figure. The grip best resists breakage when it follows the grain. From above, forend grain should parallel the bore. Straight-grained wood well laid out can be stronger and more stable than dense, figured walnut with squirrely grain. Glass bedding, even a pocket of glass in the recoil lug mortise, reduces any tendency of the wood squirm or split upon firing. But it can’t eliminate warpage. 

Checkering dresses up gun-stocks and makes them easier to hold. When hand checkering became anathema to company accountants in the 1960s, machine-pressed panels supplanted it. Offended by their resemblance to tenderized meat, traditionalists howled. Machine-cut checkering followed. 

Hand checkering still appears on custom rifles. Tight-grained walnut can hold checkering as fine as 32 lines per inch (lpi) inside skeleton grip caps and butt-plates. More typical at grip and forend: 22-lpi checkering in pointed or fleur-de-lis panels. A fleur-de-lis is a fill-in job. A point pattern incorporates the border. While a small mistake in a fleur project may be corrected, a line off kilter in a point pattern skews the entire panel.

Myriad stock finishes have been tried. They comprise three categories: Oil, varnish (lacquers too) and polymer. “Oil” isn’t petroleum oil; it’s shorthand for plant-based products like boiled linseed oil and tung oil, from pressed seeds of tung tree nuts. Ace stocker Curt Crum told me that after filling pores with commercial sealer, he finished the fancy walnut on David Miller rifles with Daly’s Teak Oil. Oil finishes infuse themselves into wood, giving it a rich, warm sheen. Fresh applications, well rubbed in, can renew that glow. Unlike polymers, oils readily “feather into” existing finish to cover wear spots and repairs. 

Production-line rifles don’t merit the costs in time and labor of hand-applied oil finishes. The first Winchester Model 70 stocks, from 1937, wore clear lacquer finish over alcohol-based stain and filler. The lacquers had carnauba wax; small flaws were repaired with stick shellac. WWII made carnauba wax hard to get, and harder lacquers evolved. Unlike shellac, they cure without imparting an amber hue.

By the 1960s, spray-on polymer finishes were showing up, DuPont’s RKW on Remington’s new Model 700 rifle. It matched the shine on Roy Weatherby’s Mark V, rolled out in ’58. Bill Ruger went for a more subdued look on his Farquharson-inspired No. 1 dropping-block rifle in 1967. The first No. 1s had eye-popping walnut, and Ruger’s finish let its color and figure come through. Since then, walnut stocks have worn soft and hard finishes, matte, satin and glossy. As figured walnut is now set on the path of the dodo, few “ordinary” rifles have it. Recently, I ordered a rather costly lever-action with a “select, A-grade American walnut” stock. Dismayed at its arrival by its fence-post wood, I should have sent it back. 

Still, in retail space, wood sells firearms! A wall picketed by ranks of black ARs and entry-level bolt rifles has the visual appeal of iron fencing. Walnut grabs the eye of even casual customers, whether or not the rifles wearing it are special in other ways. Beckoning from forests of polymer, fiberglass and carbon fiber, it’s a siren to enthusiasts sucked in by fiddleback and marblecake figure, and by fine custom stock work. These customers are also alert to second-hand rifles and shotguns with history.

In gun shops now, I pretty much ignore synthetic-stocked firearms. Walnut gets my first look and most of my attention. Recently, it drew me to a rifle that stood a couple of inches shorter than others in its rack. The stock hadn’t been lopped. Wood and metal showed only light hunting wear. The 20-inch barrel of this Remington 700 told me it was an early rifle, because 22-inch barrels became standard soon after its 1962 debut. I was pleased to add this 700 to my small assortment of later versions.

Not all shoppers share my interests; and to be sure, synthetic stocks now dominate the market. But new or used, the glow of walnut can tug customers in front of gun racks and sales counters – perhaps with questions or for a chat. They’re likely prospects for staff who know something about walnut and can hold forth on the guns that still wear it.