Originally Posted by A. G. Maisey
Thanks for that clarification Sid.
Boiled linseed oil can provide an attractive finish for wood, there is a finish that used to be used on rifle & gun stocks that is known as "London oil finish", but this has to a very large extent now been replaced by more modern finishes.
In my late teens I began making rifle stocks, it was hobby work, I did it for a lot of years, but I think the last one I made was about 30 years ago, & that was free pistol stock for a TOZ, not a rifle stock, anyway, I used London oil finish on a lot of the stocks I made. It is a very lengthy and time consuming process, it requires hand rubbing the oil into the wood over an extended period of time, a little at a time. I spent a lot of time as a kid doing hand rubbed oil finishes on bespoke furniture.
Most people who use linseed oil on wood use too much and do not hand rub it over time. The traditional London oil finish gives a subdued satin glow to wood, it looks great, but in reality it is not such a wonderful finish and requires constant maintenance. When using linseed oil for a finish the surface of the wood must not be left wet, the oil must be hand rubbed into the wood, not once, but many, many times and the surface must always be left dry.
There is an American "London oil finish" that is a better finish, and there are commercially prepared stock finishes that can produce a very good lookalike London finish if done correctly. These days I like Birchwood Casey Truoil.
Anyway, your glossy oil finish is not the way a linseed oil finish should look, there is a heap of info online about how to do a London oil finish, it might be a good idea to access some of this info.
Anyway, that's the finish, but I feel that at some point this wrongko has had some fairly aggressive sanding done on it, I'm looking at the lower face of the long side of the atasan as I'm writing this, and that seems to show variation in levels, as the face approaches the foot of the atasan it rises to meet the foot, resulting in a less than straight line, it can be difficult to maintain a straight line in sanding this area, when I have needed to do this, I've used the garnet paper over the blade of a dinner knife.
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