My philosophy of restoration in this case, is that I think people will have a lot more respect for history and the craftsmanship of the original makers if they say "Wow! That's a nice rifle!" rather than think "What a cruddy old thing! My Gargleblaster 9000 is so much nicer!" So I'm making effort to make the gun look nice, rather than preserve every flaw and injury done to it. Have you ever seen a picture that depicts the Acropolis when it was new? It's gorgeous, rather than a pillaged, blown-up, raped pile of rubble. There's a certain majesty in how it's survived this long, and it would be pretentious of anyone to restore the original because it is unique; but by the same token, if there were a million nearly-identical ones manufactured originally, and there weren't a shortage of them, I wouldn't think it a bad idea to make one or two of them look nearly like new. (Especially if the historical appearance and restoration process were recorded and preserved).
Try all these techniques on a piece of scrap wood (preferably of a similar type to the riflestock) before using them on your good gun. Pine is not a good wood to test with, since it's much softer than any riflestock wood. Make sure you know what kind of finish you're working with before futzing with it. Cabinetman has an excellent article on determining what kind of finish you're working with at ParallaxBill's stock cleaning forum.
To steam out dents, you need water and a soldering iron (the hotter the better). This is my dad's 1960's vintage soldering gun, and it works pretty well, especially with the flat 'foot' shaped point mounted in it.
After removing the finish from the wood (in order for the water to soak in); lay a folded, soaking wet cloth on the wood. Let it sit there a while to soak the water into the wood. Use a 100% cotton cloth (or at least some natural fiber) because you don't want it to melt. Rags made from old undershirts and cotton t-shirts work great; socks have too much of a 'nap' to the fiber and don't hold water nearly as well.
Here's the actual steaming process. One nice thing about this soldering gun, is that it has a light on it for
Here's the waffle-pattern dents on the underside of the stock after only a couple of applications of the soldering gun to the wet cloth. I start out with the cloth folded several times, on the theory that the steam pressure will drive more water into the wood, and I'll be able to work deeper into the wood when I go to thinner layers of cloth. This may prove to be completely unnecessary, but I'm guessing it doesn't hurt to go slow.
After a couple more applications to the leftmost dent in this picture, it's almost completely gone.
After working on the rightmost dent in this picture, it's much less prominent. It took many applications of the soldering iron and several re-loadings of the cloth with water to get to this point.
Here's the dents in the top of the stock, before restoration.
After a couple of applications, they're slightly less prominent.
Here's what the comb looks like after the dents have been steamed out. I don't know how many applications of the steam iron it took, but it was a lot. My gunsmithing book says it may take as many as 20 applications, and I'm sure I did that.
Here's the belly of the stock after steaming the dents out. A substantial improvement to my eye. You can hardly see the dents, tho they're readily detected by feel. We'll see how they look after a layer of shellac.
I went over the whole stock with a 0000 steel wool pad soaked in denatured alcohol. The flaking shellac on the forend groove is now smoothed out.
The left side of the stock had no shellac left on the surface of the wood, it was all worn down to the level of the grain. So rubbing that side down made no difference in appearance.
Here's the shellac I'm going to use. There's an excellent article about shellac by Cabinetman at ParallaxBill's message board. Basically, shellac is the spittle of the lac bug (really! it's still just collected from trees, rather than being synthetically produced). It repels oil completely, water can somewhat penetrate it, and alcohol dissolves it.
