Anyone know of a good Shelack/Laquer to give roughly the same color and sheen as the refurbished mosins?

I have a couple referbs where the stocks have substantial areas stripped and I have been considering refinishing, but I would like to try to keep them close to refurbished condition.
Also may be planing a cabinet I would like to make that color.

Go ask over here: Russian Mosin Nagant Forum.  There was a guy on there from somewhere in Russia who was selling the shellac in a dried format, like flakes.  You'd then rehydrate it and slop it on.  I might have even been vodka you mix in it.

Matt

Here's a good how-to article:  How To: Replicate True Soviet/Russian Shellac Finish

You can try Polyshade.  It is a polyurethane with the color added to  it.  I used it to make all the wood on my kitchen floor to match.  I have a Parquay floor and had to repair a few squares and could only find white oak. The rest of the floor is red oak.

I got it at Home Depot in the paint section.

I'm with jnk556....

Rit dye (the dry kind, not in the bottles) works great for me in several applications...

I use the scarlet, and brown, and orange....the orange gives it a bit of that iodine-y color...

Get a few coffee filters, put into the mouth of like a ball jar, dump the dry dye pack in, and pour in rubbing alcohol, and let drip through, it will pull the dye out, and leave behind the salt in the mix....continue to slowly drip the alcohol through until the dye is all in the jar...you can do one for each color, then mix until you get the color you desire.

The nice thing about dye is it penetrates the wood, as opposed to laying on the surface like stain....let it dry really well, you can layer coats to get the depth of color you want...

I would then take the AK furniture and hang it, and mist coat Minwax Spray Poly, semi-gloss...the furniture would come out looking very much like real Russain AK furniture...I bet it would work well for a Mosin stock...

When I built my AK-74, I spent the big bucks and ordered a NOS complete Russian original AK-74 wood set from Tantal (Doug Ford) before he died. He always had amazing stuff, and a fantastic web site...the coolest thing is it came with an original 74 laminated pistol grip, not bakelite...so freakin' nice, I never even shoot it....

98kGuy:

Sorry for the shift in topic, but do you have more information or a link concerning Doug Ford’s death? He has had serious health problems for more than a decade but he was alive and well according to this thread from April of this year:

https://www.theakforum.net/forums/14-general-discussion/286769-anyone-hear-fron-tantal-lately.html#post2722417

I might be wrong, I just assumed that he died since he stopped selling items, and the website hasn't been updated in so long....I'd go with that info, and disregard my thoughts...I also may have read it somewhere, but you know how rumors go...

Yeah, that's why I went with the poly, figured it would be tougher than the original shellac....but shellac is proper...

The red comes from garnet.  Comes in flakes.

I did several of mine with red / garnet shellac flakes.  Use denatured alcohol and wear latex or nitrile gloves, don't get the alcohol / shellac on your hands.

They turned out well, very similar to original aged color, and it is red because it is aged.  They were more of an amber color new.

Here is some info

I know I'm late to the party. But I just used amber shellac in the can from Home Depot. I also used one of those crappy throwaway bristle brushes to so that I Would have brush marks in the finish. I figured drunken Ivan would not give a shit as long as got the stock covered, so I sort of mimicked that. I was pleased with the finish.

Shellac is what they used....according to some of the AK guys the deeper red on some was due to one of the manufacturers (maybe Tula?) Using pine tar to treat the wood prior to finishing, and it is the oxidized Pine Tart under the shellac which gives it a deeper red color in conjunction with maybe a garnet shellac....because some AK furnititure has more of a orangey Iodine color, so maybe no pine tar on them...

Once, long ago, I found a web site for a guy who was nuts about recreating the finish, he had original shellac chemically analyzed in a GC, crazy, Thesis level stuff....also how they brushed it, what kind of brushes (from finding bristles embedded in the finish...)...lost the bookmark long ago, and damned if I can find it again...

Yeah while I want to take them back to a near refurbished state I don't want to go that far.
This rifle made me think of it, the stock is in good shape with a big refurb stamp on it but about 40% of the shellac is gone.
Normally I would have passed....  I just found the proof marks interesting and the price was decent.