Henry Frontier stock refinish

[danall]

Bear with me, this post is only meaningful with picts, which i will try to post.
I made a recent acquisition of the Henry Frontier 22 but i never liked the finish on these as the walnut wood grain is almost totally obscured. A you know its a satin finish but appears really lifeless, almost like a brown paint with a wee bit of transparency. So i decided to refinish...one thing i will say it's an extremely durable finish. No luck with sanding it down, resorted to the scrape method, to give you an idea of how durable, in one specific location i counted the scrapes to get down to wood, 36 scrapes in one small location, took over 6 hours to sand and scrape. I then did a very light golden pecan stain/sealer then multiple coats of very thin rubbed in Birchwood Casey True Oil. The beautiful walnut grain now shows thru.

In the full length pict the Henry is the lower rifle,while it's a Rossi 357 on top. Sorry bout posting a pict of a Rossi, but that is one i also refinished...used 3 different stain sealers to get the tone i wanted.

Now in the pict of the stock closeup it shows the refinished Henry and the Rossi prior to refinish (but a different side of the stock than what is shown in the full length image.

Note: i really wanted the Henry 357 but when i was looking there was none available anywhere. The Rossi i reworked internals (it needed it), the Henry i never touched. The butter smooth action is great and has a stock trigger pull of 2 lbs 10 oz and has a better trigger feel than any of my other firearrms.

Side note, one of the most beautiful rifles I've seen is the Winchester model 70 Super Grade with the blond maple stock. I recently refinished a friends stock trying for that light blond look and he's totally blown away with the result.

stock_refinish_01.JPG

stock_refinish_03.JPG

[danall]

oops, i did not realize the program would resize differently than what appears in the preview, the preview looked correct,this looks awful as the length has been truncated. darn it.

[Vaquero]

They look good, I generally resize my pictures before posting here, plus they load faster.
Runny I also did my 357 Rossi and my little H001.
I did not use any stain on mine just multiple coats of tru oil, the Rossi came out fairly light.
The Henry kind of reminds of an ole Winchester look.
I have another Rossi that I'm going to strip and do it, just waiting on a tad bit cooler weather.
The 44 BBB may get the same treatment.
I use a product called CitriStrip, and but stocks cleaned up pretty easy.

RP

[danall]

The oddly resized image bugged me enough that i thought i would try it again. I suspect my problem was that when i resized I also cropped to a linear/horizontal aspect, this forum program resized that to put it at a "normal" aspect ratio, thus squishing it horizontally. I'll try keeping it at a "normal" ratio and see what happens here. Also note, the Rossi had a much thinner easier to remove finish. Sanding alone worked fine. The Henry appeared to have some really heavy duty urethane type finish that was really tough, nice walnut behind the Henry, the Rossi is a much softer wood, while they claim it is a hardwood, it is definitely softer than the Amercan walnut.

stock_finsh2_01.JPG

[Vaquero]

Both of those butt stocks came out great in my opinion.

RP

[fortyshooter]

That Henry came out really nice and great work!

[JVogler]

Painting, staining and finishing work can be tedious and frustrating at times. Your finished work is beautiful and you should be proud of it. Artistry on display.

[Mr. Neutron]

Indeed, those are 2 very pretty rifles, danall! I'd be proud as heck of those!

Randy (Vaquero), I don't mean to hijack danall's thread here. But could you possibly post a pic of the guns with the Tru-Oil finish? Or maybe a link in some other thread, please? I'm wondering if it gives the different woods an "Ambering effect" like it did on a guitar I used Tru-Oil on. That alder body took many (12-15) VERY LIGHT coats of Tru Oil. I was very proud of how it turned out when it was freshly done. I like that guitar so much that it became my "Daily Driver" that I played almost daily, and as such it's taken a beating, but still looks pretty good. I really like how it made what little grain/figure alder has "pop". It does similar things to walnut as well; tends to make the grain really jump out at ya.

[Sir Henry]

Fantastic work. They both look great.

[markiver54]

Nice job! They look great.