doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Stock Making / Fitting

wow! Didn't know it could be done that accurately. Now I know why few people do it by hand...
Yeti, I missed pics of that Miroku you were working on a while back...

Dave,
I got the stock 90% done and was so dissatisfied with the quality of what I'd done, especially on the fore-end, I started over. Also the bummer of throwing away a nicely figured chunk of walnut was diminished because as I chopped away on the blank, the figure almost dissapeared.
I learned a bunch while doing the first one so version 2 is going much faster with much better results.
Here's where I left off on Ver1, next to a much happier Citori project:

Looks OK from a distance, but up close all the mistakes were in my face. Hanging around here has set the quality bar higher, in a good way.

Yeti, it looks great from here...sent you a PM, as it looks a lot like what I'm about to start.

Here's another in progress...



I can't stress enough the usefulness of this approach to restocking a shotgun, no matter its intended purpose.

About 20 years ago, I got bitten by sporting clays in a big way. Just prior to that, my main hobby was varmint rifles and I had amassed a collection of 9 complete custom rigs comprised of bolt actions and Ruger single shots. I did a brisk business with Fajen since I had restocked everyone of them with exhibition wood. I learned inletting, finishing and checkering but, of course, nothing about "fit" since I can wrap myself around any rifle stock and make the shot. Success was all about optics, triggers, reloading and bench technique and had virtually nothing to do with stock fit.

My first clays gun was a Ruger O/U and of course I dived in head first and restocked it immediately. I had Fajen supply me a semi-inlet with a round knob grip and schnable forend ( a very unique Ruger!), but being a newbie to shotguns and completely ignorant of gun fit, I had it made with the factory dimensions. After shooting it a year, I'd learned enough to know it didn't fit me well, but not enough to avoid yet another mistake. I sold it and bought a new Beretta. This time I shot targets for 6 months with the factory version before deciding, yep, this was my dream gun......all it needed was exhibition English stocks. Clever me, I sent Fajen my factory stock to duplicate just to be sure the new stock would be identical. It was, and I spent another year on a shooting plateau before realizing that it didn't fit. A great revelation occurred when I had a local stockmaker bend it up 1/4 INCH AT THE EYE! Within weeks my tournament scores jumped 10 targets and I had a win at a major shoot, bounding into AA class. Maybe I could have gotten there quicker with a professional fitting, but the DIY approach suits me.

By now, I understood gun fit, and especially MY fit, well enough to successfully stock several game guns from semi-inlets by providing the turner with numbers alone. But after shooting my Beretta comp gun for 10 years, I was interested in trying some new things. I wanted to experiment with a tighter grip radius, a palm swell, a parallel comb and more weight. How could I try these things without jeopardizing my game? I bought a Beretta trap gun with all those things, put a set of flat-rib barrels on it and sanded down the comb to get the right picture. After awhile, I had my first PATTERN to send out for duplication and my second Beretta comp gun has all those features while retaining exactly the same sight picture as the first.

My game guns are slightly different, but I learned my ideal fit the same way. You can pay a fitter and trust he gives you the right numbers. You can send your numbers to a stocker and trust you wrote them down correctly. You can trust the stocker to match the numbers. A numbers error can occur anywhere along the way. Or you can say, this is perfection, copy it.

The gun pictured will be a dedicated clays gun. It's an 8 lb, 32 inch Fox that will get the full custom treatment. The pattern is complete enough for testing, but not ready to go out yet. I shot it at the pattern board and Bond-ed for DAC, DAH and castoff until I got absolutely dead-center patterns from a low gun mount. Then I shot sporting clays with it until I was satisfied I couldn't learn anymore from that exercise. Done, you think? Nope. I shot trap with it under the lights at night. This removes the barrels from my vision and gives the truest impression of what might occur when I'm shooting on auto-pilot. Throughot pattern and clays testing, I made every effort to not "check" and adjust my sight picture. In spite of that, shooting straightaways at night showed me I need a bit more cast. When I'm finally satisfied, I'll add 1/32 inch more Bondo to the comb, just to make extra sure the new one has enough wood to take some off, and send it to the duplicator.

I'm just a few steps behind you mike, thanks for your insight.

Mike, is that two part bondo? The stuff on the stock looks like an overlay. Are you that neat or are you using another material?

Hansli, Thanks. I'd like to hear about your experiences too.

Builder, it's 2-part Bondo, but probably 3-4 major applications from a couple of different cans. Sometimes the hardner has been pink, other times blue. When I vary the amount of blue hardner to get different working times the color can range from sea-green to blue.

If you look back at my first pictures in the thread (a different gun), you can see the layers on the butt end and how I built up Bondo on the off side so I could remove wood to create castoff as well as raising the comb.

The forend started as a splinter. If I used only Bondo, it would wind up 75% Bondo and probably be too fragile to use as a pattern. Notice Chuck extended his pattern butt with wood as well as Bondo. I started by grinding a couple of flats on the forend wood, then gluing a pine strip to each side. This gives a better frame to support the glass.I've ground the forend down to approximate the final shape and feel during shoot-testing. That's why it has the stripes. Before I send it out, I'll beef it up more so it holds up well; the extra wood will be easy to remove when the stock comes back.

Thank you. Of course, now it is obvious - great observation powers that I have. LOL!

when I converted a splinter LC to a BTFE, I glued on blocks of wood and used a dremel tool to clear back the wood from the metal and then bondo'd much like Mike. If you have plenty of clearance from the wood, bondo will fill it well. Use plenty of mold release on the barrels and you'll end up with a perfect contour of them in the forend.

On the top of the comb for that Parker pattern, I glued a 1/4" wide strip of wood on the comb, ground it to the DAC and DAH measurments and used that as the target and support for the bondo to fair it in.

Keep in mind that Bondo is not very strong in thin sections. If you don't have a stock that has perfectly matched inletting to your gun, using a harder/stronger material to mold the inletting into your pattern is best. I've used Devcon Aluminum. Other types will do. But bondo may crumble in small detail areas of the inletting, or so one machining inletter told me.