Yeah that's nice ! That thing looks allot better then mine. Did you oil that stock ? Good job of cleaning it up. All numbers match big bonus.
I stripped the stock as close as I could to bare wood - which was not easy. Then I applied a couple coats of Boiled Linseed Oil with some stain mixed in for color. I'm going to give it a couple weeks to completely cure and then will either apply another coat or two or I will finish it with a high quality wax to seal it.
How did you strip it?
That looks like you did a pretty good job.
That's a long story. I ended up going through multiple different processes multiple times trying to strip the stock before I finally arrived at something I was satisfied with. So, here goes.
1. Initially cleaned with mineral spirits which is what I commonly use for all the parts when I first break down a milsurp rifle to get rid of cosmo.
2. Following a YT tutorial by Larry Potterfield (MidwayUSA) on how to strip a stock using an Oil based finish, I then used Lacquer Thinner. It took a "little" off at first, but then seemed to have no further effect after several hours of patiently working on it.
3. I then moved on to CitrisStrip which was recommended by IraqVeteran and on many gun boards. After doing one round for a short period to ensure there was no impact to the stock, I did a second application for about 16-20 hours and used a rough pad to clean it up. As before, it seemed to do some initial effect, but left quite a bit behind. I think I tried a 3rd time as well.
4. I then moved on to Turpentine. This was used by Potterfield in a separate tutorial where a stock was soaked with gun oil. This rifle was most problematic in the grip area behind the receiver and potentially was due to gun oil. Same as the others, took some off right away, but didn't do much after that.
5. I think I went through all three of the above again without getting close to "bare" wood.
6. I finally resigned myself that the time and effort to get anywhere near what I needed was beyond what I was willing to invest. I decided to do a final clean up using mineral spirits to get rid of any remnants from the previous chemicals followed by warm water. This did the trick! While there was still some depressions where it was not perfect, the overall stock was nearly bare.
All this was over the course of a couple months, working on it a couple times a week. That is why it took me a couple months before I ended up looking for more info and finding this thread.