doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion Classic & Custom Single Barreled Sporting Rifles @ doublegunshop.com Stock finishing classes for amateurs???

I like to have some part in the building of my rifles besides simply writing the checks. They call it sweat equity in home building, and the parallels between homebuilding and gun building are many.

While I am not particularly good at it, I do enjoy fitting wood when I have the time, and I definitely like finishing wood - though at times I think it may drive me suicidal; for instance, the highwall I'm building that didn't like BenMatte on top of Permalyn sealer. Something I could have figured out on a test piece, but, well, let's just not go there.

Anyway, that same stock has developed what I can only call blisters - raised spots in the wood that look as though there is some localized fluid pushing the wood's surface up - not just the finish, the wood. The wood was previously sanded meticulously flat, or at least smooth to the proper curvature. These blister like things occur in two or three discrete patches.

Anyway, things like this, things like getting the finish absolutely uniform all the way into the very inside corner of a cheek piece shadow line, and all sorts of other minutia of stock finishing drives me batty at time - or maybe it is just more batty.

In any event, I'm about to take off for Raton/Trinidad to shoot for a couple of weeks and it occurs to me that I could just as easily be going to a 2 wk workshop on stock finishing or rust bluing or both, or whatever. So, finally, does the school at Trinidad offer such workshops for folks that are frankly never going to be more than rank amateurs? Does anywhere else do this? While some general wood working courses exist that covers some of this, gun work is significantly different that I don't want to waste time learning to do things that require orbital sanders and the like.

Brent