Comments by "Gaza is not Amalek" (@Ass_of_Amalek) on "Arming God's Battalions: a Papal States Rolling Block" video.

sanding a woodworm-damaged piece of wood only ever enlarges the visibly damaged area. what you see are the holes the grown beetles make to fly away. before that, the larvae snake long winding burrows through the wood and take care to avoid penetrating the surface to protect themselves from predation. it's common for woodworms to burrow parallel to the surface of a piece of wood at less than a millimeter distance (I'm guessing they turn around when they see light penetrating the wood). basically they do much more damage under the surface than they do at the surface. thus trying to sand away woodworm damage typically transforms an image of a few round holes into a big mess of longitudinally opened channels, with several times more missing surface area. they seem to have gotten lucky with that on this gun, I only saw one spot where one of the holes was open longitudinally. but they certainly made nothing better about the holes by sanding. that is a lot of holes btw, the stock has pretty bad structural damage. it's interesting that it has almost all the holes on one side - I suspect that the rifle was stored laying on its side, and the side with the holes was up. in nature, woodworms would tend to eat dead fallen trees and branches, and when those are laying on the ground, going up gives the best chances of a clear escape path.
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@petesheppard1709 I'm a violin maker/repairer. worm damage on violins and such is, if you set aside damage from terrible "repair work", the absolute worst. and it's always worse than it looks from the outside. if there are cracks, you can just glue them back together, if corners are chipped or worn off, you can cut smooth joints and fit pieces of new wood. but with worm damage, the missing parts are inside, and in very irregular shapes. you can try to fill the tunnels with epoxy to at least restore compression strength, but that tends to make the holes even more visible as the epoxy penetrates the wood, and you probably won't get it in deep since the worm poop blocks most of the tunnels. a very common fix is to just put putty in the end of the tunnel to make it less visible, but of course that doesn't remedy the structural damage.
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