Thread: Rifle stock oils

I was recently given a new-to-me oil product for use restoring rifle stocks. Its a clear 100% oil product with a range of stain colours. The product is Sikkens Cetol HLS:

Sikkens Transparent Timber Finishes New Zealand

Seems to be for mainly exterior furniture use and is available from some stores.

Have tried alot of oils and often rejected them due to their dull oily finish but this one is interesting. It has similar properties to Danish Oil in that it can be applied with piece of cloth or brush and dries to a hard shell satin finish. Like Danish it is supposedly waterproof, and produces a hard dry finish about as good as a satin varnish. It has the advantage over varnish however in that you can simply spread on another coat whenever you scratch the stock. I used bit of cloth to spread it and it came up well.

The oil I used was in light oak stain, and had a hint of brown colour depth to it. Came up very well on a little Marlin stock - highlighted the grain quite well.

Danish Oil tends to give a nice goldy look, but the Sikkens has a range of tints. Most of them are not usable for rifles, but the first tint light oak is certainly light, and the darker teak and dark oak could be good for say JW15 stocks which are almost balsa white. Means stain and finish in just 2-3 coats of the one product which would be helpful.

Sikkens Transparent Timber Finishes New Zealand

I see you can get this in 100m test tins so might get the teak and dark oak also to experiment. The Sikkens and Danish Oils with their nice hard satin finish remove the need to do any more varnishing on rifles.

Worth a look

Any pics of the Marlin finished?

Here's the pics of the finished Marlin with 2-3 coats Sikkens oil:

http://www.nzhuntingandshooting.co.n...semiauto-1187/

That came up mint man, i always thought it was darker than that but we were using it on rimu.