I believe I may have stumbled upon a gem. This has to be the rarest of the rare, a fore-end checkered by none other than Ray Charles. I was de-oiling it, in prep for a refinish, and found this evidence.

Cock-eyed checkering pattern:



Initials of what may be the checkerer, RC.



What'cha think? Ray Charles?

better than I could do and I'm only near sighted

Looks like a Remington made Marlin...

Almost as bad as some of mine......

I'd guess Stevie Wonder...Geo

Not a bad first effort for a 12 year old. You got to start somewhere. His problem started when he tried to keep the double border spacing which ran into the checkering. Or he just failed to stop short of the border and lost his place.

Maybe a reverse christopher reeves

Tell ya' one thing for sure. Whoever did it wasn't a Libra, like me.

Two points I picked up on this example of the the avante garde school checkering.

The semi-centered layout was obviously added to assist the thumb grip. The more enlightening observation is that I realized I had never before understood the potential multiple dimensional property of skip line checkering. I had previously assumed that the style was limited to skipping entire lines in a regular pattern as is often found on the boring examples produced by people such as Weatherby, Anschutz and Sako. I had never appreciated the complexity possible by varying the spacing of the skipped complete rows and interspersing it with rows where sections of the individual rows are skipped in a random pattern. Every pattern is a one of a kind.

Maybe a Fox Sterly forearm perhaps.

Nope, it's my old Montgomery Ward/New Model. 12 gauge, 32" barrels. Just an old cheap "truck gun".

That looks like the ugliest piece of wood I have ever seen.

You should really get out more, Jimmy. I've got some uglier than that.

Another "keep'er" gun. As in "I keep her in the truck." Gil

I miss the days when a visit to Ward or Sears included the possibility of looking at guns. I think that's yet more evidence that I'm now definitely a senior citizen.