Stock Refinishing with Tru Oil

Not too long ago I bought one of the Civilian Marksmanship specials. The specials are remanufactured M1 Garands with new barrels and new stocks. Once mine arrived I was rather pleased with how it looked, however I needed to do something with the stock as it was essentially bare wood when I got it. I decided to use Birchwood Casey's Tru Oil on this project.

Unfortunately I did not take any pictures before I started so I will use some proxy pictures that hopefully will serve the purpose.

On the right is a picture of the CMP special from the CMP website. You can see that the wood looks nice but it needs some finish. After receiving mine I took all of the furniture off and used a bit of 400 grit paper to smooth out a few rough places and then give it a light sanding overall.

Then I blew all the dust off with my compressor and then used a tack cloth to remove anything else.





Seeing as how I failed to take pictures of my stock before refinishing, I am going to shoe some pictures of a box that I made for my wife not too long ago. I made a small jewelry type box out of mahogany and I used Tru Oil to finish it.

The piece on the left is this picture is raw mahogany that I had cut to form one side of the box. I sanded it with 200 and then 400 grit paper to smooth it out. Then after cleaning it and wiping it down I applied the first coat of Tru Oil. I used a piece of cheese cloth folded up into a pad and applied a light coat. I stress the light coat part. You do not want to put this on too heavy. It would probably be a good idea to do this in a dust free environment.

The piece on the right has had one coat of Tru Oil applied to it.

The first coat will probably soak right in but keep it light and spread the oil into the wood grain. The first coat will probably need to dry for at least 2 to 3 hours depending on the humidity.

Once the first coat is dry you will need to buff it out with some steel wool. I usually use OO or medium grade steel wool depending on the branding. In the picture on the right the steel wool grades from the left are coarse, medium, and fine. This brand of steel wool the medium is about OO and the fine was close to OOOO steel wool.

You do not need to push hard when buffing the finish, just some light pressure should be fine.

After buffing out the finish I used the compressor to blow out the dust and wool particles and used a tack cloth to clean up the surface. Then I applied a second coat of Tru Oil. You will find that the second coat will use less oil than the first coat so go sparingly at first.

In the picture on the left you can compare the raw mahogany to a piece with two coats of Tru Oil on it.

For my Garand I used three coats of Tru Oil. Some people will say that you need to use more. I have seen some nice rifles that have used six to eight coats but I was pleased with finish after three and at the time I was tired of buffing it with steel wool and I wanted to get out and shoot it!!!!

On the right is a picture of my Garand with the three coats of Tru Oil. You can see that it has a nice satin finish and the Tru Oil really made the grain pop.

And now since I know you want to see it is a picture of the box that I made for my wife. With this I went to six coats of Tru Oil. If you click on the picture and look close you can see that not all of the grain is filled in. You could go even further if you wanted and continue applying coats and buffing until all of the grain is filled but I kind of like the way it looks.

You can put a really nice finish on your gun stock with Birchwood Casey's Tru Oil. There is a little bit of work required with the prep work and buffing. If you take your time and plan carefully you can end up with some nice looking furniture.

Email Content Type

I have a Drupal 6.15 instance that uses the SimpleNews(6.x-1.0) and Mimemail(6.x-1.0-alpha1) modules.

When I send a newsletter and receive it in Outlook 2007 I receive a poorly formatted text email with an html attachment. What I want is for the html attachment to be the email.

At first glance this is a client side problem with the client(Outlook) not interpreting the content-type correctly. But it is not real important if that is correct or not because I cannot expect all of the customers to change their email clients just for me. So I need to change something on the server side to force this to appear correctly in the email clients of the customers.

The content type I am seeing the received email is

Content-Type: multipart/alternative; charset="utf-8";

I read some forums and dug around in the Mimemail module code and decided to change the module to force the content type to multipart/mixed.

To do this added an extra line to mimemail.inc at line 321

$content_type = 'multipart/mixed';
return mimemail_multipart_body($parts, "$content_type; charset=utf-8");

After sending a few test emails this seems to have addressed the problem. There may be a better or more correct way to address this but it works for now.

UPDATE:
There was an update to the Mimemail Module that invalidates the line number I mentioned before.

The new version is 6.x-1.0-alpha2 dated 24 March 2010.

 The following line is the last line and the return from the function mimemail_html_body

return mimemail_multipart_body($parts, "$content_type; charset=utf-8"); 

What you want to do is force the mime type just before the function returns. So just prior to the return set the mimetype with the following line.

$content_type = 'multipart/mixed';

Leupold Mark AR Review

I have been in the market for some decent optics for my flat-top AR. With the economy the way it is I initially tried to keep the cost down and crashed and burned with the NCStar Mark III. Thankfully Midway USA made the recovery much easier with their no hassle return policy. After that experience I put aside some money for a little while until I was able to save up enough to order a Leupold Mark AR from Optics Planet with a coupon. I also purchased a one-piece Burris Scope Mount from Midway to go with the scope.

The Leupold Mark AR comes in a 1.5-4x20 model and a 3-9x40 model. You can buy it in Duplxe or Mildot reticles and the lenses are coated with Leupold's Multicoat 4 System. This system is supposed to result in increased brightness, contrast, and clarity. The view through the scope looked good to me although I did have some issues making out 22 cal holes at 100yds.

I bought the 3-9x40 version with the Mildot Reticle. It is a one inch tube in matte finish. 

The elevation knob is adjustable in 1/2 moa increments and includes a built in bullet drop compensator calibrated for the M193 round. A 55gr bullet at 3200fps. Leupold offers the ability to purchase a custom calibrated compensator for the load of your choice.

I mounted the scope to my AR using a Burris one piece mount.  This particular mount is really intended for AR platforms with shorter stocks. I was very impressed with the amount of eye-relief that this scope offered. The optics were clear and easy to see.

For the real test I used some more of the Black Hills 55 gr ammo that I got on sale back before the election of '08. I bought a whole lot at the time, one because I got a good deal, two because I was under the impression that Black Hills was some good stuff. I have gone through quite a lot of this in the past few years and I have not been impressed. It is supposed to be 3200fps but I have had it chrono from 2800 to about 3120 and everywhere in between. Not the most accurate in the world but it was cheap and good for plinking.

I didn't have a lot of time this day so I got it sighted in and then started firing 3 round groups starting at 9x. 3 at 9x, 3 at 8x and so on down to 3x. You can see the results here 21 shots at 100yds. Not the best shooting in the world but I am happy to report that I did not have any real change in the point of Impact like I did with the NCStar. The next chance I get I will take some of my handloads out and practice for a little while. Even though the Leupold and the mount together were about four times the cost of the NCStar, there is a noticeable difference in the quality and I think it was worth saving up to purchase.