Article reprinted from Chuck Hawks, for your information.
Modern classic stocks are basically designed for use with telescopic sights, but rifles so stocked often come with iron sights, which must remain useable. So the stock is somewhat of a compromise in that its drop at comb is intended to favor optical sights but still accommodate iron sights.
While any stock may be made from a variety of materials, the usual choices are solid wood, laminated wood, and synthetics. Solid wood stocks are usually made of walnut, birch, or beech and occasionally of maple, myrtle, or mahogany. Laminated wood stocks are made of layers of hardwood or walnut and hardwood glued together under pressure. Synthetic stocks are usually made of an injection molded plastic or a molded fiberglass shell filled with plastic foam. All of these materials can be made into functional gunstocks.
The best wood for solid wood stocks is generally considered to be walnut. A satisfactory stock must have certain properties, and walnut fills the bill better than other woods. For example, stock wood should be reasonably hard but not brittle, stiff, dense without being excessively heavy, take checkering well, and have attractive figure and grain. The thin shell European walnuts are particularly durable and attractive.
Unfortunately, because of its beauty, walnut is also in high demand for furniture, and the big bucks are in furniture rather than in
gunstocks.gun companies simply cannot out bid the furniture makers for nicely figured walnut. So fancy walnut stocks are becoming a custom proposition, priced out of reach of the average shooter.
A nicely figured walnut stock is a thing of beauty. It is also very functional. Walnut is stiff and resists side loads (like a shooting sling). It handles the battering from recoil well. It feels good to the touch, particularly in wet or cold weather. It can be touched-up or refinished if marred. Walnut is a superior gunstock material, but it is becoming more and more expensive even in plain grades. It is to the advantage of the major gun companies to move shooters away from walnut and into less expensive synthetic stocks. I have learned the hard way to insist on genuine walnut stocks on all of my hunting rifles.
Other, cheaper, solid wood stocks are made from various hardwoods, primarily beech. Beech is a light colored wood with little grain or character, so it is usually stained to resemble walnut. Such a stock is satisfactory in use, but nicks and scratches reveal the white wood under the walnut finish. These cannot be touched-up, as could a genuine walnut stock, and soon the "walnut finished hardwood" stock starts to look really tacky. I have owned such stocks once or twice, but never again.
Laminated wood stocks are actually the strongest and most stable of all stocks. Functionally, they are superior to both solid walnut and the synthetics. If laminated from decent woods and well finished they can be quite attractive. They are cheaper than solid walnut stocks because they are made from smaller slices of wood, most of which cost less than good walnut. The grain in the various layers of wood is designed to run in different directions and cancels out any tendency of the stock to warp. When properly glued under pressure and sealed laminated stocks are immensely strong and warp resistant, and virtually impervious to the elements. Laminated stocks are generally regarded as the stiffest and most accurate type of stock.
One of the first production hunting rifles with a laminated stock was the Remington Model 600M bolt action carbine. I ordered one as soon as they were announced. The stock was laminated beech and walnut with a clear RKW finish, and it proved to be attractive and much more rigid and accurate than synthetic stocks. The laminated hardwood stock is probably the best and most attractive alternative to a solid walnut stock.
Synthetic stocks, so far as I know, began in the U.S. with Savage/Stevens rifles and shotguns during the Second World War, when all of the walnut was going into military rifles. These early synthetic stocks were made of wood grained plastic, and proved satisfactory. I once owned a Stevens .22/.410 combination gun with such a stock.
The first really successful commercial rifle with a
synthetic stock was the Remington Nylon 66 autoloading .22 rifle. As the name implies, the stock was molded of DuPont Zytel nylon, a very tough plastic material. (DuPont owned Remington in those days.) The Nylon 66 was followed by a lever action version called the Nylon 76 and tubular and box magazine bolt action rifles named the Nylon 10 and 11. I owned all of these rifles at one time. Back in the early to mid 1960's I was experimenting with synthetic stocked rifles. Unfortunately, I found that their benefits were outweighed by their disadvantages.
Although the Remington Nylon series rifles are long discontinued, the idea resurfaced as walnut became more and more expensive, no doubt spurred by the U.S. military's adoption of the M-16 infantry rifle with its black plastic stock. This time, with a chance to both increase the bottom line and hold down suggested retail prices, the major gun manufacturers spared no effort to successfully market their synthetic stocks, touting their ruggedness and weather resistant qualities.
No one seemed to ask just how often the average shooter actually broke a wooden stock, or what would happen to the rest of the rifle if it were subjected to loads severe enough to snap the stock. (Ever seen a rifle run over by a tank or tossed off a cliff?) Or even if synthetic stocks were actually harder to break than a wooden stock. It turns out that the common injection molded stocks used by most of the big gun companies are not significently harder to break than a walnut stock, and much easier to break than a laminated wood stock.
Other advantages of synthetic stocks include the fact that an elaborate and extensive checkering pattern can be molded in at practically no expense, they can be made any color desired, and they flex so much that they tend to moderate the effect of heavy recoil. (Or so I have been told--this is something I have not experienced first hand.) The biggest advantage of synthetic stocks remains that they cost the big gun companies much less than a wooden stock. (Allegedly between $5 and $10 per stock as I write this.) This allows the company to make a few pennies profit to pay their lawyers and keeps down the retail price to the customer.
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While the “year of the duck” became the year of hard luck for many fowlers in parts of the country that were despicably warm still in midwinter, it was not for lack of proper arsenal that the birds weren’t falling. Like next year’s duck counts will no doubt turn out, this year’s crop of waterfowl guns offers a lot of carryover from the year prior, including some ultra-light autoloaders, guns with wicked new paint jobs, a killer Lego kit of a Mossberg pump and an insurrection of well-made guns that won’t kill your kid’s college fund.
