Staining and Finishing

At long last I could begin work on the whole raison d'être for all the work up to this point: creating AK furniture capable of transforming a high-speed, low-drag fighting carbine into a rifle better suited for a tea party.

Given the amount of work it had taken to reach this point, the actual staining was fairly simple: I just slapped on a couple applications of stain according to the directions on the can. This consisted of wiping on an even coat with some tack cloth, waiting a couple minutes, and then wiping off the excess. I repeated the process to get a darker shade.

As I'd expected, the stain didn't have any effect on the glue holding the laminate together, so the wood ended up retaining its laminate pattern even through the stain--all except for the handguard, which had been made from a solid piece of real wood. It was entirely possible that the non-uniform wood stain would see merciless mocking by members of the tactical crowd not currently agonizing over color mismatches between different companies' shades of Coyote Brown. However, I liked the effect: The wood was blue, but it was still obviously wood. Had I wanted a solid color, spray paint would have been much quicker and easier.

All that remained was some kind of finish. I had two options: spar polyeurathane and tung oil. Polyeurathane would leave a thick, weatherproof coating ensuring that the handguards and buttstock would not be damaged by low-crawling through a salt marsh toward the enemy position; however, it would leave the wood feeling plasticky and tends to show brush strokes or drips if applied by someone inept. (Hi!) There was also the fact that the stuff I had on hand was satin-finish, which didn't seem quite right for wood this glamorous. Tung oil would let me control the smoothness of the finish and leave it feeling like wood; there was just two questions: Would the laminate absorb oil, and would the tung oil remove any of the stain as it was applied? Preliminary tests on the sawed-off vertical foregrip showed that the answers were "yes" and "no," respectively, so I proceeded.

The results were excellent:

Three coats of tung oil left the wood with a semi-smooth but still wood-like feel. The only surprise was a faintly metallic sheen produced by some unknown interaction between the stain, laminate, and oil.

I don't have pictures of the tung oil at the various stages of application because my photographic skill is insufficient to show much of a difference.

The magical moment had arrived, and I wasted no time mounting the new furniture on my AK using the standard tools for this activity: a mallet, a screwdriver, and harsh language.

The results were wondrous to behold...