Removing soaked-in oil from wood stocks

[Wapiti]

Hi fellas,
Just wondering anyone has had success removing the dark oil stains that often are found on old historic firearms with walnut stocks?

I'm referring to oil that has soaked in around action areas from overdoing the anti-rust storage oiling that people tend to do, or maybe it's just because the stocks were never sealed properly in the inletting.

A mate has found a beautiful old 32-20 92 lever gun from the original settling and clearing period in this area, and although the stock on this rifle is original and hardly dinged at all, around the wrist of the butt where the tang is, and the forend around the barrel and mag tube, it's soaked in all this lubricating oil and is just about black.
The rest of the stock has visible fiddleback and grain, and it'd be great to know some ways anyone's used successfully to draw this out and dissolve it somewhat.
Soak in thinners somehow?
Some kind of made-up oil-drawing paste?
He's put it out in the sun and wiped off the oil that comes out and sits on the top as liquid again, but it just keeps on coming.

[straightshooter]

There are two ways to go about it.
Deeply heat the affected areas with a hair dryer or fan heater and then immediately wash off the area where oil oozes out with kerosene but not aggressive solvents like thinners or petrol.
You want the internal parts, as far as there is oil penetration, to be heated without overheating the exterior wood.
Keep repeating every couple of days until no more oil comes to the surface when thoroughly heated.
Alternatively procure some powdered TSP sold as Tricleanium at Bunnings and make a fairly thick paste and apply it liberally to the affected areas and leave it to dry.
You should see a discolouration in the dry paste as the oil is drawn out.
Repeat until no more oil comes out and then wash off any paste remnants preferably with distilled water or rainwater.
Budget a couple of weeks to do a proper job either way.

[Wapiti]

Thanks for that info, Straightshooter, and taking the time to help.
Doesn't seem that too many people have encountered this with all the old guns being played around with.

Because we were keen to give this a go on the weekend, and to get to town is a 3hr round trip with diesel here at $3.60L, time is also expensive here and the rifle owner had only a day off, we used what we had.
So we did two things, used a heat gun and wiped the oil that came to the surface with enamel thinner soaked rag.
He thinners because that's what old mate had, and he didn't want any oily products .
Straightshooters tips and some we found when googling suggested either, so we tossed the coin.

The heat gun instantly pulls the oil to the surface, it just pops out and pools, to be wiped off with the soaked rag.
We kept concentrating on a particular spot, until it stopped pulling out oil and the grain lines reappeared. It was amazing how much was soaked in around where the steel in the action and barrel met the wood, and inside the inletting. By a well-meaning owner, not knowing that the wood was not sealed in the inletting.

Eventually, over a few hours coming back to it, all the black oil spots were gone and all the grain was showing completely the same as in the unsoaked areas. It was amazing.
Then we mixed some talcum powder with metho to a drawing paste, and trowelled it on the previously oily areas. When the metho flashed off, the dry powder pulled a tiny bit more oil out, but bugger all was still there. I guess without a heat gun this would do the whole job itself, but way slower than the heat gun did initially.
Then we tried the heat gun again, and a tiny few spots came up to be wiped off with thinners.
Then a second coat of our talcum paste, but there was no oil left.

I was amazing to see the grain that came out, which was previously black stains. Amazing change.
We wiped the complete stock over many times with the thinners on a rag, and it flashed off immediately.
We had a choice of either some new danish oil, or some Tru-oil, and we thinned out the first seal coat of danish oil and it was amazing to see how the wood that was previously saturated with black old oil just sucked the danish oil in immediately. Unreal.
Should've seen the fiddleback in the stock! Beautiful.
Steve will keep on doing this, including in the inletting until the wood is completely sealed from any more lube oil being able to soak in.

Again, thanks for the tips, Straightshooter.
And the talcum/metho drawing paste works unreal and costs bugger all too.
And the enamel thinners evaporates completely and is way faster evaporating out than turps, We didn't see any downsides to thinners, and it didn't bleach out any timber colour whatsoever and actually caused the oil to pull out quicker because it soaked immediately deep into the wood, but the heat gun pulls it straight out.