doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Fine tuning a buttstock and pad............

Sometimes a pad will just not lay flat against a stock. There seems to be the slightest space which light makes look worse. If the pad fits perfectly and the butt stock has been well finished and the space still exist then use a little epoxy. I coat the end grain of the stock with a thin coat of epoxy to seal the end grain. Then I add black coloring to a second thin mix and place it on the wood before I screw the pad down. Wipe off any that extrudes out the edges of the pad. It, the epoxy, fills in that paper thin area and help makes the pad fit like a second skin layer.

I like to use a chop saw with an ulrafine blade; at least 80 carbide teeth. I have several and none of them have any jigs or attachments. The most basic installation is when I'm maintaining the original pitch. I use a vernier caliper to scribe a 2" line parallel to the original butt and make a single wrap of electrical tape. The tape touches the 2" scribeline but I curve it around the heel, toe and backside so the blade will cut through the tape everywhere except for the first contact. I stretch the tape very tightly and massage it thoroughly to ensure maximum adhesion.



I use a scrap board long enough (30") to support the entire stock and I start by putting the comb tight against the fence with the blade away from the butt.



I swing the blade in to contact both heel and toe and lock it at the right pitch. This works well for preserving the original pitch when cutting a curved butt. The small gap you see is because the blade is perpendicular to the table but the butt is not.



Assuming the original butt was cut squarely, I can shim up the head of the stock with 3X5 cards until the butt makes full contact with the blade, assuring me of making a perpendicular cut. If the stock had been cut poorly before, I can make a square cut by finding the height of the shim mathematically. I can use calipers to measure the widest part of the butt, subtract the width of the head, divide by 2 and get the thickness of the card stack required for a square cut.



When I have any chipping, it's usually attributable to a Remington Imron finish or some miracle epoxy. Every new pad gets a light kiss on the belt sander to flatten it. In my earliest attempts I thought there must be some secret to getting the pads to conform to the wood. I tried heating them to soften them, even sandwiching them between 2 boards overnight with 3-4 bags of lead shot on top. Finally, I realized how simple it is to sand them flat. You can see how little was removed from this one; it wasn't even necessary for the belt to touch the center.



Sometimes it's possible to eliminate a very tiny chip out in the finish by sanding the butt on the table of the belt sander. I NEVER turn the power on. I push the heel the length of the table with both hands; then draw the toe back the length of the table.



I do that for several passes, then turn it around and push the toe/pull the heel.I'm extremely careful not to rock the stock.
I try not to press my luck; maybe a dozen passes total, frequently checking to see I have a flush fit.



These pics are not of an actual installation, but just as illustration.

Mike,
Thanks so much for the excellent writeup with pictures! Threads like tthis one are really helpful for all of us. You just saved me a bunch of time on my next one!

--Jay

Excellent post Mike. Thanks for taking the time and sharing your expertise.

Another Mike Campbell "how-to" to be saved locally, along with his great checkering post.

Thanks, Mike!!!!

You're welcome, guys! Lots of ways to skin a cat; you just gotta find a way that you don't lose any of your own!

Agree completely! Now where or when was that checkering post. I can't seem to find it and would like to read it. Thanks, Keith

Can't you heat the pad in some water and bend it to fit the curve ?

Wouldn't want to forget one other little thing here. Noticed Jimmy plugged his old pad holes with dowel. Lot of things can happen with a plug both softer(white pine whittled) or harder (birch dowel). Unless the old pad was mounted way off the vertical centerline, your new centers are going to be on the same line vertically. And maybe they won't be even an entire hole dia. off the old. So you drill a couple pilot holes for the screws and the twist drill pulls into the plugged hole. You drive in the screws and a pad that perfectly mated with the butt is suddenly bucking up in the middle. I think that means the screws centers are effectively too far apart because of the nature of the plugging. Pan head screw going in at angle and bearing only at the top of top hole and bottom of bottom. Or conversely holes are effectivley too close together; screws go in crooked and bear only on the bottom edge of top hole and top edge of bottom and the toe and heel kick up. I've had this scenario happen and no amt. of surfacing of the butt or the pad by any means will defeat this distortion. Only solution is to leave screws loose and bang the pad around with the heel of your hand to keep it correctly registered, or make darn sure those screw pilot holes and on the correct centers and not travelling. And I don't have any problems shooting the butt of a stock (or the bottom of a pad similarly) with a long sanding block with a 3 by 24 belt stretched on it and achieving a single plane end to end and laterally, but will admit that any "self-jigging" tool (which a sanding block is) will not automatically correct to the pitch you want and also create an equal angle to the broad faces unless that's pretty much what you have already or you work down to a scribe line. I have nothing against chop saws, radial arms, and table saws; spent 36 yrs. alongside these blades and lost the hearing in my right ear to them; it's the way some people are going to use them (without enuf experience to have the tune in their head) that offends my sense of survival. Put that in your personal archive as a sort of "I told you so" for the unwary. You have the right to screw up your pretty wood, or worse, your body parts any way you want; it doesn't mean you MUST!

jack

Wow!! Thanks for your wonderful post, Mike. I will try that method out next time. I will probably practice with some old wood first. For now, last night I used the vertical belt sander and it came out pretty good. But I will try the chop saw using your method. Once again, thanks for the tip. And rabbit, you are right about what you said. I put on a KICKEEZ pad and I had to use the dowels to fill the old holes so I can have problems with those, too. I think the best way to use dowel rods is to countersink them just a bit to keep them out of the way. And the tipped screws have certainly given me fits before. The original pad/stock on this gun was curved to start with. It was easy to find the center because it was already marked with a pencil down the center of the stock- I am assuming it was put there at the factory, so I just used it as a reference to drill the new screw holes. But I really appreciate all the help you guys have given me. Thanks and good luck.