{"id":5767,"date":"2019-08-31T07:00:15","date_gmt":"2019-08-31T14:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=5767"},"modified":"2020-12-01T18:41:33","modified_gmt":"2020-12-02T02:41:33","slug":"refinishing-the-mini-14","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2019\/08\/31\/refinishing-the-mini-14\/","title":{"rendered":"Refinishing the Mini 14"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A couple of years ago I spotted a beat-up old Mini 14 rifle stock in the used parts junk pile at my favorite local gunstore, and I thought it might be fun to refinish it.\u00a0 It was for the earlier series Mini 14 and I didn’t own one, but the stock looked like it needed me.\u00a0 It was dinged up but didn’t have any gouges, and the anodized aluminum buttplate had multiple scratches.\u00a0 I asked John, the guy behind the counter, what he wanted for the stock, and we were both in a quandary.\u00a0 John’s brow furrowed.\u00a0 He was searching for a price that wouldn’t be insulting, but I could see that he was eager to unload something that had all the earmarks of becoming a permanent resident.\u00a0 There were several old timers in the shop (there always are; it’s that kind of place).\u00a0 All eyes were on John and me.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know…maybe $25?” John said.<\/p>\n

I recoiled as if struck by an arrow.\u00a0 It’s all part of the game, you know. \u00a0 All the eyeballs were on me now.\u00a0 It was like being in a tennis match.<\/p>\n

“I don’t know, John,” I answered.\u00a0 “I was going to offer $30, but if you gotta have $25, then $25 it is…”<\/p>\n

Everybody laughed and I went home with a Mini 14 stock that looked as if it had been to Afghanistan.\u00a0 I wished I had the foresight to grab a few “before” photos of it, but I did not.<\/p>\n

Like I said, the stock was decrepit, but I wanted a refinishing project and now I had one.\u00a0 I removed all the metalwork, I stripped the finish (you can see how to do that in our series on the Savage 340 refinish<\/a>), I steamed out the dents (same story there; it’s covered in the Savage 340 stock refinish series), and then I went to work on it with 200, 320, 400, and 600 grit sandpaper.\u00a0 The buttplate was hopelessly scratched all to hell, so I did the same thing with the same grades of sandpaper and I decided to leave the aluminum bare.\u00a0 In one of my prior aerospace lives, I worked at company that made interior doodads for aircraft, and the approach I just described was one we frequently used for doorknobs, latches, and the other metal chotchkas you see in aircraft cabins.\u00a0 That particular company was not a good place to be (my boss was a butthead), but I liked working with the crew of Armenians who handled all of our finishing work.\u00a0 Whenever I had an idea about making an improvement, those guys were quick to tell me that wasn’t how they did it in the old country, and I went with their expertise (it was the right thing to do).\u00a0 But I digress; that’s a story for another time.<\/p>\n

Mini 14 stocks are birch, which is a light wood, and the question was do I want to stain the birch for a darker look, or leave it unstained for a lighter look?\u00a0 I went for Door Number Two, and I think it turned out well.\u00a0 I used the same approach described in the Savage 340 blog, taking care to use very light coats applied with a fresh bit of T-shirt cloth each time and waiting a day between applications.\u00a0 This one has 10 coats of TruOil<\/a>\"\".\u00a0 TruOil<\/a>\"\" is good stuff.<\/p>\n

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I had a beautiful rifle stock, but no rifle to go with it.\u00a0 One of my good buddies told me his brother had a Mini 14 that was in rough shape, so I gave the refinished Mini 14 stock to him to send to his brother.\u00a0 It was a fun project and I really liked the way this one turned out.<\/p>\n

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Check out our other Tales of the Gun<\/a> stories!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A couple of years ago I spotted a beat-up old Mini 14 rifle stock in the used parts junk pile at my favorite local gunstore, and I thought it might be fun to refinish it.\u00a0 It was for the earlier series Mini 14 and I didn’t own one, but the stock looked like it needed … Continue reading “Refinishing the Mini 14”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[840,347,1645],"class_list":["post-5767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-guns","tag-gunstock-refinish","tag-mini-14","tag-truoil"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5767"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11232,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5767\/revisions\/11232"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}