Hot rodders have a term- period correct. Often used incorrectly, it means parts and methods from the time the style of car is supposed to represent. The age of that wood would make it an acceptable addition to your rifle.

1 year per inch of thickness plus a year after for things to stabalize.

Too many contingencies on this subject to even come close to covering in this format. The 1" per year is a commercial standard for most, but not all, species.  There is air dried and their is kiln dried with the later most likely to create stresses such as ' case hardening ' from gas fired kiln operators pushing timber too hot and too fast. For lots of standard market hardwoods the 1" per year generally yields a workable timber but this formula runs into problems when you approach 10/4 and 12/4". Few commercial kiln driers want to handle timber thicker than 10/4" since it ties up more valuable kiln space than their pricing can afford. 

So big heavy highly figured timber pieces such as used for gun stocks cannot be trusted to any formula. The good stuff is air dried for years and years and monitored with moisture meters. The tricky part with highly figured wood is the presence of internal stress but then again some species like most of the walnuts and live oaks though highly figured tend to stabilize even though they don't look like they should. Wood is always alive and always reactive to moisture/humidity so the end user needs to understand and compensate for this. 

Rick

Last tree I cut up got about a thousand blanks plus forestock blanks. Of course more than several had defects. Saved all the ones with defects and planned to drill into them periodically to determine rate of drying. Don't remember ever drilling into one but it was a good thought. Still have them scattered about used for dunnage and this and that. Good blocking or whacking something. I should drill one.

Didn't Browning try packing their blanks in salt to speed up the drying process? I have heard about the subsequent failure.

Many years ago A Canadian A explained to me in detail how Walnut is dried. First you soak the blanks in antifreeze. Then after a certain amount of time, I cannot remember the soak time, you stick them in a microwave oven. Followed his instructions to the letter but only on one reject blank. I suspected he was an idiot and it turns out we're both idiots. Him for coming up with the idea and me for doing it. Only thing I did right was using the wifes microwave when she was out of the house.

westerner wrote on Oct 4^th, 2025 at 3:31pm: