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Old May 18, 2009, 05:57 PM   #12
Evan Thomas
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Join Date: July 7, 2008
Location: Upper midwest
Posts: 5,631
Quote:
I can say from experience that wood can and does dry out. More like guitars, guns are handled routinely, and moved into and out of controlled enviroments, and exposed to dirt, grunge, finger funk and body salts. I very routinely see guitars with fretboards that have dried out and cracked, especially in necks where the fretboard is just waxed(no laquer on the board).
Yep, wood sure does dry out, and that's exactly what a surface finish, like lacquer, is meant to prevent, or rather slow down: rapid changes in moisture content from moving from a humid environment to a dry one, or vice versa. Wax is definitely not adequate to prevent this. But the wood is still going to pick up and lose moisture seasonally or from being moved into different conditions of RH; even a good, well-maintained finish just slows this down to where it's less likely to damage the wood. Can't speak to guitars, but in furniture, drying out and cracking of wood can result from exposure to too much moisture: the wood swells, the fibers take a compression set, and then, when the RH goes down again, the fibers can't expand evenly, and you get checks in the wood. And, of course, that's why we put wax or some other heavy coating on the end grain of boards we're drying -- end grain transfers moisture much faster than face grain, so if you slow that down, the wood is less likely to check during the drying process. But once the wood has checked, that's pretty much forever; you can't fix it by adding moisture back into the wood.

You can improve the appearance of a rather small piece of wood with checks in it, like a molding plane, by standing the end grain in boiled linseed oil for a few days, so the oil gets soaked up that way. Checks are still there, but this will sometimes expand the wood fibers so that they're hidden. I suppose this might also work with a gunstock, depending on the species of wood (size of fibers), but I've never tried it with anything but molding planes.

And I wonder if lemon oil works well as a treatment for guitars because it's a pretty good solvent for oily finger-and-hand gunk, which is the worst thing I know of for a finish. Worse even than Pledge, which is saying quite a bit...
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Last edited by Evan Thomas; May 18, 2009 at 06:03 PM.
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