doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DIY Gunsmithing @ doublegunshop.com fillet repair

It has been slow on the board, especially with gun related topics. I thought some of you may find this repair to be interesting.

This is a wonderful old Rigby percussion rifle built in the early 1850's, it had a crack in the hand and the wrist pin was rusted in place, the rust eventually turning to wood rot. I cut out the bad section, tightly fit a piece of 1/4 sawn Turkish to insert well on each side of the crack. The rot extended on one side beyond the trigger guard and into the checkering, a smaller piece was epoxied in place to repair that area. The new wood was re-inlet, then checkered to match, tricky because of the way the original checkering was cut, the wear on it and the fact that it was filled with grime and finish. The owner of the gun did not want all of the checkering re-cut, he just wanted me to match the repaired area with the existing checkering. I think it cam out well. The rifle will return next winter for a new wrist pin. I forgot to snap a picture of the large fillet but I think the pics tell the story.

Excellent!

That is a technique that works great. About three months ago I used a similar method on two guns. One was a Parker 1879 lifter that hat a piece broken out of the rim on the sidelock inlet just down to the level of the bottom of the inletting. I have a small based Dremel routing attachment that I use when inletting guitar inlays. I marked two parallel lines across the missing area and used the flat around the sideplate to ride the router base. I carefully removed the chipped area, cut a piece of matching walnut and epoxied it in. I filed and sanded the curved areas to fit and used a razor sharp thumb plane to cut the patch down in the border area around the sideplate. (covered it with thin tape to tell when I was almost there. color matched the new wood and then French shellaced the patch and it looked really good.
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The more radical one was on an 1882 top lever Parker hammer 16. I bought it and disassembled it to to some mechanical repairs. The stock, which looked solid outside, turned out to be chewed and eaten out in the internal works/trigger group area. The grip and upper mating area seemed solid but there was little viable structural materil around the triggers or bolt/locking area.

Since the tang inlet was narrower than the trigger guard, I clamped the stock in a padded milling machine vice, indexed it, and milled a 1/2" slot for about 3" back from the stock head, leaving a slot the readned up near the upper grip line. I cut a block of very dense walnut, insert it and marked the surfaceon the side of the block. Bandsawed this to shape and glued the block in.I then reinlet the head and internal areas and the result was very tight and strong.

Just shows that a lot of times inserting a block of wood is the only reasonable thing to do. I would rather have a tastefully repaired original stock than a multi-thousand dollar rebuild.

It would be great to see a project like this in progress with photographs. I suppose that what slow down the progress, but sure would be nice.

I should have taken more pics but I am crazy busy. I did snap this one. The wood is set up in a vise, leather on the jaws, swivel base and pointer to find center line and get the cut kind of level.

Beautiful work!

Very nice job !

Thanks Gents! I forgot to mention that on these type of repairs I have been using G-flex epoxy the last few years. Really great stuff that was designed for repairing wooden boats.

Great job Steve