Very nice wood!

A friend, John Gillette, always told me that whenever you are building a custom gun or restocking one, buy the most expensive blank you can afford … it takes as much time and costs as much money to stock a rifle using a $100 blank as $1,000 blank. 

I have 2 or 3 blanks that I bought just because the wood was too nice to pass up.

Some of my rifles have that fancy squirrely grained wood. They shoot better than the rifles with plain strait grain stocks.

That’s One to remember! Thanks Bill

Lumber 2.0

Something to do on a snowy Sunday;  re-visit the lumber pile 

With all due respect to John Gillette, I'd bet that if a stocktaker knew, that he was going to be working with a "squirrely" blank, that the cost wouldn't be the same, as a plain blank.
The really fancy blanks are notorious for having hidden defects, that seem to only show up when the stock has been completely shaped.
A good thread would be "rifle stock defects that I've known". Repairing a defect can be a tremendous amount of work but when done so that you can no longer see the defect, can also bring tremendous satisfaction.
My prejudice is that the source and type of wood can be related to the number and size of internal defects. My vote for the some of the fanciest but difficult to work wood blanks, would be Turkish grown, English walnut.
Do you have any other candidates ?
Otto

Fine wood and good case colors are hard to resist.