Cleaning Gunstocks and Wood Furniture

To make a simple, effective, and inexpensive cleaner for wood--furniture, gunstocks, axe handles, what have you--simply pour some boiled linseed oil into a container and add the same amount of turpentine or mineral spirits (I use odorless mineral spirits).  Dip some 0000 (pronounced "4 Ought") steel wool into the mix, squeeze out most of the liquid, and gently rub with the grain of the wood.  Then wipe off with an old cloth.  Twenty-four hours later, wipe dry again.  Simple, right?

This cleaner works because the turpentine or mineral spirits dissolves wax, grease, and residue from fingerprints, as well as those small paint flecks from repainting a room with a roller.  The linseed oil restores some color to the wood and appears to revive the existing finish. 0000 steel wood is the finest grade, so it cleans without scratching.

Here are Before and After photos of a neglected walnut stock from a U.S. 1898 Krag carbine. As found, before cleaning:

 

Some original finish can be seen, but it's gone from most of the stock.  Water has stained the butt end,and, unfortunately, this cleaner can do nothing about that.

 

After cleaning with the linseed oil and mineral spirits applied with 0000 steel wool: 

 



Obviously, the cleaning has evened out the color of the stock.  Perhaps that should be qualified:  evened out the color of the wood--if you look closely an inch or so away from the butt plate, you can see lighter spots where someone filled some holes with plastic wood.  But now the stock no longer looks neglected.

Some notes on use:  Boiled linseed oil, not raw.

Linseed oil can spontaneously combust, so dispose of the steel wool and rags carefully.  I wet them with water and then put them in a plastic bag.

Don't slop it on:  the mixture can stain upholstery or your clothes or carpeting.

Don't take this mixture internally:  it's bad for your health.

Use the steel wool with a light touch:  you're not trying to get down to bare wood but to clean the finish.  Two light goings-over are far better than one heavy-handed one.

Don't skip the twenty-four hours later wipe-down.  If you missed some areas, the mineral spirits will evaporate, but the linseed oil will remain sticky and collect dust before it dries.

If you want to wax the piece, wait until you can't smell the linseed oil any more.

Finally, three "If's":  If the wood is antique cherry, test on an area you can't see.  Some old cherry was stained but never given a finish coat, and this mix can dissolve the stain.  If you're not sure what the wood is, test it where you can't see it.

If you have a funky painted piece with the paint going chalky, don't mess with it.  That patinated surface is part of its interest.  As John T. Kirk has commented in his excellent Impecunious Collector's Guide to American Antiques, "buy it ratty and leave it alone."

If the piece of furniture (or gun) is museum quality, don't touch it.  I've read statements by curators saying that this mix will blacken wood.  I've used this mix for fifty years on walnut and mahogany and haven't seen that happen.  But don't gamble:  get in touch with a local museum and ask for guidance.  The museum people will bless you for it.

Deciphering Belgian Proof Marks

A reader has asked me to say something about Belgian proof marks.  I've owned two Belgian side by sides and two Browning Superposed, so I guess I can say that I have some acquaintance with twentieth century ones, but unlike my posts on antique English shotguns I don't have an antique Belgian one at hand to describe.  I'll restrict myself therefore to saying something about gun making in Belgium and offering some proof marks.  To my knowledge, there isn't a book out that covers European proof marks:  If someone knows about such a book, please add a comment with that information.  [Later note:  Gerhard Wirnsberger has written The Standard Directory of Proof Marks, translated byR. A. Steindler; it is available from Blacksmith Publishers Corporation.]

Because of its deposits of coal and iron ore, industrialization took place early in Belgium.  That, plus its skilled work force and their comparatively low wages, quickly made Liège a center for gun making.  Belgian firms could produce whatever was wanted at whatever price point, and the wage structure made their prices lower than their competitors.  As you might imagine, many, many Belgian guns were exported to other countries for resale.  

What I first look for are the marks indicating country of origin.  The US never had a proof house, of course, so you have to rely on maker's names--which may well be deceptive versions of famous makers  (Purdie for Purdey, for example)--and addresses (sometimes deceptive, as well).  But if the gun is a British or Continental breechloader, it should have proof marks on the water table of the receiver and on the barrel flats near the breech.

Here's an illustration of early twentieth century Belgian proofs from W. W. Greener's The Gun and Its Development, 9th edition (1910):





The first on the left and the fourth (the one that resembles a candlestick) indicate provisional proof.  The second and third indicate it was proofed at Liège.  The one on the far right is the definite proof for nitro, or smokeless powder.

Lee Kennett did a fine survey, "A History of Proof Marks:  Gun Proof in Belgium," that was published in The Gun Digest (1978).  I've reproduced Kennett's numbers in the complete list at the end of this post:





Other important marks give information about the barrels:



"70" is the metric equivalent of our 2 3/4" chamber length; many older guns of course will have some metric number like 65, equivalent to 2 1/2" or 2 9/16".  The gauge or bore is typically indicated by a "12" or "16," often accompanied by the chamber length (see Kennett's no. 33 below).

Choke is so indicated in English (why, I don't know), and it can be an indication of date:





Here is Lee Kennett's complete listing of Belgian proof marks in his "A History of Proof Marks:  Gun Proof in Belgium," published in the 32nd edition of The Gun Digest (1978), 129-138.





No small part of the Belgians' remarkable ability to meet the demands of a wide variety of firms trading all over the world was their willingness to go on producing type of guns that were obsolete.  Flintlock fowling pieces and rifles were made for the Northwest Indian trade until the early twentieth century; so, too, percussion long guns for sale in Africa.  Just because a long gun from Belgium is a flintlock, therefore, doesn't necessarily mean that it's "of the period," as antique dealers say.  It could be of relatively recent manufacture.  Caveat emptor!  Check the proof marks! 

If you are considering buying a Belgian gun, look long and hard at its quality.   Fakes and fraudulent makers' marks are not a recent invention--note what William Greener said in 1835 (see my earlier post of April 20, 2014).  If the price seems too good to be true, it probably is.  As the old saying has it, "The buyer needs a thousand eyes; the seller, only one."  The other side of the coin is that quality can indeed be there in Belgian guns:  The Belgian Browning Superposed were all fine guns, while firms like Francotte, Dumoulin, or Lebeau-Courally could make guns of very high quality indeed.  



 

Girl Hunter, by Georgia Pellegrini

Georgia Pellegrini's Girl Hunter:  Revolutionizing the Way We Eat, One Hunt at a Time (Da Capo, 2011) recounts a year's road trip devoted to eating only the meat that she herself had hunted and killed.  She is quite clear that her path may not be for everyone:  when people tell her that they don't think they could hunt, she tells them, "If you want to feel what it is like to be human again, you should hunt, even if just once."  Her reason?  The understanding of that experience will change how you interact with the world and thus affect who you are and what you eat.

Pellegrini's purpose, in short, was to discover what it means to be a responsible, ethical omnivore in today's world.  To this end, abetted by friends and their friends, she learns how to use both a shotgun and a rifle.  She then hunts, dresses, and cooks game ranging from wild turkeys, javelin, grouse, chukars, doves and ducks to wild boar, deer, and squirrels (this last, in fact, affords one of her best chapters).

She is candid about her own inadequacies, forthright about her mistakes, and she bears up under some trying conditions and one absolutely appalling host (see the chapter "Calamity Jane").  She takes the bloody bits in stride, neither pretending they don't exist nor being appalled by them. 

And my, oh my, the recipes she provides!  I made a note to myself to try three of them:  "Whiskey-Glazed Turkey Breast"; a Provencal version of "Pheasant Tagine"; and "Braised Rabbit with Olives and Preserved Lemon." 

My only negative reaction concerns Georgia Pellegrini's title: Girl Hunter?  Give me a break!  As an older white male, I can only deplore any term that trivializes women, no matter how replete with ironic emphasis that term may be currently. That aside, this book is a keeper.

Deer Hunting in Paris, a memoir by Paula Young Lee

Anomalies abound in Paula Young Lee's Deer Hunting in Paris:  A Memoir of God, Guns, and Game Meat (Palo Alto:  Solas House, 2013).  In Paris, working on her dissertation, she looks on the web for a date appropriate for one of her friends back in the States.  She finds a lawyer living in Wellesley, MA, but her "lizard brain" informs her that this "John" is the one for her.  Despite their agreeing on nothing whatsoever, it turns out that he is the one for her--except that he believes in marriage, or at the very least a committed relationship, and she doesn't.  When she returns from France, she agrees to live with him, but she regards it as a sociological experiment in monogamy.

Experiencing what it's like to live with someone and at the same time standing outside of the relationship in order to critique it is at once why this "memoir" succeeds as much as it does and, perhaps, one reason why it stops short of being completely successful.  Being on the outside looking in is a useful stance for a narrator--think of Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.  But that's fiction, and this purports to be memoir.  Lee is entertaining on her allergies to every type of food except meat; she makes us care about her Korean-American crippled father, who has ministered to congregations in one small town in Maine after another, and she can be laugh-out-loud funny on the incongruities she perceives.

Carried along by her exuberance, the reader may not notice how much Lee never mentions, but that's one indication that this work is not a memoir.  Admitting she went to Phillips Andover, she omits where she went to college, what she studied in which graduate school, whether she got a degree, how she supports herself, and, especially, how she can spend so much time away from work to be with "John" hunting and fishing near, but not actually in, Paris, Maine.  (It has to be Paris, Maine, rather than the house of John's parents in Bethel because otherwise the cute title won't work.)   Lee doesn't hunt or fish herself; she goes along with John and his brother or his son or his father when they do these things. 

Lee organizes these experiences in a casual, chronological way, stopping whenever she wants to riff on some topic, a number of which have little to do with God or guns or game and should have been cut.  In this sense, the book reads more like a journal.  What counts in a journal is getting something down; it's a record of a lived (if not always understood) life and the movement of one's thoughts.  It's experimental, almost by definition, because none of us ever fully realizes at the time just what a given experience means.  But a memoir is different:  it may incorporate elements of a journal, but those elements are distilled to reveal their essence. 

Unfortunately, Lee attempts to have it both ways, and the result is a disjunction between recording experience and assessing its significance. For example, here is Lee writing about John getting ready to field dress a buck that he's just shot:

     "As I stand there, holding the light, John adjusts the carcass, positioning the blade for the first cut. 

     "There is a moment, a balking, before the body.  It always happens, even to experienced hunters.  The first cut is an irrevocable act.  But it is something else, a primal activation:  the sight of the incommensurable.  It is to look Medusa in the face, and thus to be turned to stone.

     "We are frozen in the dark" (208)."

Notice the shift in point of view, from literally what she is observing to "it is," the way things are.  This person has never witnessed anyone field dressing a deer before, so how does she know that this balking always happens?  Who has told her this, and when?  Furthermore, dramatic as the reference to Medusa is here, what function does it serve?  Being turned to stone is one thing, "frozen" [in movement, we presume] is another, and in any case it is only a  moment before John "suddenly slices open the belly."  What is this, instant defrosting?  What happened to the primal activation, to the sight of the incommensurable? What justifies the reference to looking Medusa in the face?   Apparently, Medusa is there only for rhetorical effect--and when you look at the prose carefully, the hype is not justified. 

What we have here, therefore, is an uneasy mix of journal and memoir.  Having read this book twice, however, I am less inclined to fault Lee than her editor.  Lee has written an amusing, provocative, and occasionally bone-true book about coming directly to terms with the meat we consume.  Whether we are vegetarian or eat meat, we all have blood on our hands.  What Lee needed when Deer Hunting in Paris was in manuscript was an editor who could see what the book was about and help Lee shape it accordingly.  Instead, I imagine, Marketing reared its ugly head:  "Wow!  Here is a book by an Korean-American woman about deer hunting in Maine.  It's funny!  And she's a reformed vegetarian and a locavore! This is a winner!"  And so it was rushed into print before it was ready.  A first-rate editor would have helped Lee use her very real talent to re-shape the book.  That, unfortunately, was not to be--and we are the poorer for it.

Bluefish from Sea to Table

Just back from a wonderful trip with our friends Sandy and Drena Worth to their beach house on Kure Beach, NC.  Inhabitants of Ithaca joke ruefully about its being centrally isolated, and the isolation that weighs most heavily on me is its distance from the salt water.  They say that some people long to live on mountain tops, some in caves, and still others near water.  I enjoy fishing on lakes, love to fish rivers, but my preference would be to live near the coast and fish in salt water.

This trip, the fishing was nearly as straightforward as it gets:  take the spinning rod out from the basement, bait with small mullets the two hooks above the triangle sinker, and cast it out as far as possible.  Remove the slack until the line is taut and think positive thoughts.  Here's Sandy:

And here am I, taking up slack:

 

A close observer will notice that the bottom of my pants legs are wet from the waves coming in after I've gone to the edge of the water to cast.

 

In not too long a time, we had two blues, enough for dinner for the four of us:

 

 

 

I oiled the broiler pan and followed the Canadian rule of ten minutes per inch of thickness, turning them once.  The only tricky thing was putting the smaller fish in later and removing it a bit earlier than the other.  Once the flesh flaked, I removed the bones and drizzled melted butter and lemon juice over the fish.  If I were to do it again, I'd slice some lemons and put them in the body cavity before broiling.

 

 

Broiled bluefish, fresh heirloom tomatoes, and some garlic bread.  Add some wine.  Finish with a salad.  Wendell Berry remarked that the shortest distance between the hand and the mouth was the best.  Bluefish, hooked and cooked:  It doesn't get much shorter than that.

 

And as our expressions demonstrate, it doesn't get much better than that:

 



William Greener's "The Gun" (1835)

This post is not about W. W. Greener's The Gun and Its Development, first published in 1881 and commonly available in the 9th edition of 1910.  That book deserves to be in every gun enthusiast's library because it contains a truly extraordinary amount of information, all readily accessible because of its index. 

Instead, this is about William Greener, the father of W. W. Greener, and the rather smaller book he published in 1835, The Gun; or, A Treatise on the Various Descriptions of Small Fire-Arms, now available as a reprint of 240 pages from that wonderful firm Cornell Publications for the bargain price of $19.95.  I won't say that every enthusiast should own it, but it does offer some intriguing insights into the early percussion era.  (If you buy it and decide to try some of Greener's recommended loads, do please note the errata on the title page!)

William Greener had worked in London for the legendary Joe Manton but then went back to his home town of Newcastle to set up as a gun maker, eventually moving to Birmingham in 1844.  Although the tone of The Gun is at times exasperated, its arguments are always rational, the outcome of Greener's involved and prolonged experiments.  Apparently, once he had arrived at an opinion, he was not easily induced to change his mind:  he and his son so disagreed about the value and future of breechloaders that they were estranged for some time (it probably didn't make it any easier for Greener Senior that his son turned out to be right).

Again and again, William Greener condemns the shoddy practices of contemporary gun makers.  According to him, lots of workers were unemployed after the Napoleonic wars came to an end, wiping out the demand for military muskets (about which he also has some forthright opinions, most of them highly critical). "These men," he declares, "now make a living by manufacturing guns of the most rubbishly and dangerous description." 

Greener believed not only that the proof houses were not rigorous enough, but when even those low standards could not be passed, it was a common practice to forgo or to forge the proof marks on the very cheapest guns.  And the markets for these shoddy guns?  There were two major ones.  One was Africa.  To his credit, Greener waxes indignant about these practices:  "These guns were manufactured for the dealers in slaves, by whom they were carried to Africa; and there a gun untested, and without strength, was given in exchange for a man!  Numbers of mutilated wretches were to be seen in that country; and we have the testimony of travelers, that multitudes have lost their lives by the explosion of these worthless guns, the victims of the avarice of men denominating themselves Christians" (p. 77). 

The second market for these shoddy guns?  The other major market was America.  So if you find a bargain English muzzleloader by an unknown maker and want to shoot it, lashing it to a tire and testing it yourself with proof loads at a safe distance might be in order!

Several other topics are interesting.  Greener goes into the deceptive versus the proper way  of "staining" ("browning") gun barrels and why someone ordering a gun almost certainly will be cheated unless he insists on the proper way.  "For the benefit of amateurs," he lucidly explains how to make "alkanut" ("alkanet") oil to color walnut and how to use nitric acid (aqua fortis) and iron filings to darken maple stocks.  Finally, for anyone shooting sitting ducks or geese, he describes a method that will produce better results--but for that information you'll have to read the book.

Given Lemons, Make Lemonade; Given Suckers . . .

A popular saying proclaims, "If you're given lemons, make lemonade."  This saying came to mind today when, fishing the first time this spring for trout, I caught a sucker.  I should stop right here to add that my relationship to suckers is not a recent one:  we go way back.  When my family moved from New Canaan, CT, to Seattle in 1954, we stopped in Livingston, MT, to fish for trout.  My father had decided on Livingston because he had asked A. J. McClane where he could find some good fishing en route to Seattle.  Apparently, McClane had snorted at my father's ignorance and said, "Montana, of course!"

I had just started fly fishing, using my grandfather Cox's Leonard (heavy, whippy, with red silk wraps every few inches) together with a level line, an outfit my father had pronounced "Good enough for Gerry."  I actually managed to hook a big trout in the Yellowstone--it may have grown in retrospect, but now I'd say it was a good three pounds--and I rather liked this new kind of fishing.  Then my father discovered Armstrong Creek.  In those days, as I recall, there wasn't even a fee to fish; you simply had to obtain permission. Off we went.  I discovered some huge fish finning in the current and tried every fly I had over them.  Not the slightest quiver of a fin in response to my Royal Wulff, my ginger BiVisible, or my Grey Hackle Yellow.  Then my father walked by and scornfully remarked, "You're fishing for suckers!"  My interest in fishing suddenly evaporated.

Many years later, I managed to persuade my boss Thak that we could combine a recruiting trip for Cornell with an afternoon in early June on the Letort  in Pennsylvania.  The landscape was altogether different from Armstrong Creek, but the water was not:  tricky braided currents between plants reaching the surface.  And history repeated itself:  I put one dry fly after another over two really big fish, until a change in the light revealed them to be suckers.

Despite these periodic encounters with suckers, I am always surprised when I actually hook one in Fall Creek, some ten blocks from our house in Ithaca, NY.  Rainbow trout run up from Cayuga Lake to spawn in the tributaries in the spring, together with some landlocked salmon--and suckers.  Anticipation runs high whenever the spring rains actually pause enough for the creeks to clear.  My first fish is almost always a sucker, and I am almost always surprised--and disappointed:  I am keying on rainbows.

Today, however, fourteen days after the trout season opened, fourteen days of mounting frustration because the tribs were blown out from rain storms, I saw pairs of suckers making their way upstream through the shallows of Fall Creek.  For once, I realized from the outset that they were there.  I put on one of my favorite searching flies, an Egg-sucking Leech.  Nothing.  I added some weight.  Nothing.  I added some more weight, felt a fish briefly, and then on the next cast lost it to one of the grabby rocks Fall Creek is infamous for.  Not wanting to lose more flies that actually take some time to tie, I put on an Estaz egg imitation.  Fish on!  I got the fish on the reel, it ran upstream, rolled up to the surface, and revealed itself to be a big sucker.  Too bad, I thought.  Then it turned and went downstream, running line off the reel.  And I suddenly realized, "What's wrong with catching a sucker?  At three to four pounds in weight, a sucker is strong, it runs off the reel, and catching one is a lot more fun than not catching anything at all!"  I hooked and lost about five, and landed five or six more.  I had a great time. 

If you're given lemons, make lemonade.  If what you can catch are suckers . . . change your mindset and enjoy yourself!