doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com AYA wood

Mark does a beautiful upgrade on stocks. His "inking grain", the British term, takes a extension or plain grained stock and makes the entire gun stock look better and work better. His art work goes well above that. A hundred times better, than simple adding a recoil pad and a thousand times better than adding a white line recoil pad. I was looking for a reason to buy a small milling machine from Grizzly. I just ordered a small DRO Metal lathe from them to play with when I retire. Right now I could do it with a drill press and a milling table setup I have. But as a friend once said, you can never have too many 220 volt tools. And with a small milling machine I might make a couple hit and miss engines or a few stationary engines. Not going to retire soon, but I better have things to do once I do, because the sofa has not hold for me. I'd rather be making things, fixing things or breaking things.

I think John Roberts nailed it with the "pallet grade walnut" tag. But if someone said the first one was walnut stained beech, I'd hesitate to argue without a DNA test or a closer look. It isn't super hard to ID walnut in a good close up pic, but we've seen some "experts" here who couldn't tell a feather-crotch black walnut blank from a finished thin shell walnut stock that had totally different figure and grain.

I've never been a fan of the fake grain painting process for guns. Sometimes it looks OK for hiding a wood buttstock extension or a repaired area. But it is often very overdone, almost like a Liberace costume, or a woman with too much makeup. Some are gaudy enough to gag a maggot in a gut pile. And the process is quite expensive, especially for a surface treatment that would be totally ruined with any future refinishing attempt. I like KYJon's idea of doing butt transplants instead. I think one could still buy short butt blanks with nice grain and figure at a reasonable enough price, that a few butt transplants would quickly pay for that Grizzly mill to cut the mortices.

For quite a few years now AYA have had decent wood upgrades available.
I have a #2 with wood that is well above what I’d expect to see on a gun in that price range.