He was full of it. Never believe anything you hear in a gunshop, is like gun show Navy Seals. Tons of people and companies have made wood furniture for ARs though. There used to be adverts in American Rifleman for them. It's actually a lot less complicated than trying to make an M14 stock set.
The AR-10 furniture set was glass reinforced plastic over a foam core, that was the original brown furniture set. The front handguard was actually conical. This was in 1956. AR-15 is scaled down AR-10, I have a 1958 technical report on a very early one but photocopy is very very bad and I cant see pictures. It's described as "plastic" handguards though.
I cant imagine why they would go and commission wood handguards in the mid '60s. That is about the time they were taking the M14 out of service. That was after the whole product improvement program for the XM16 and they finally settled on the A1 design.
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