Dec 26th 2017
Now to make pappy happy, is get to work on his kit rifle. I got a good start so far, just going slow and doing a lot of extra fine detail. Tomorrow I will inlet the trigger guard and then look at bedding the stock.
Traditions St.Louis Hawken
.50cal
28 Barrel - 1:48 Twist
First thing I started with was the de burring process. I use both sand paper ( 100 - 150 - 220 grit ) and a sharp wood carving tool. I have both flat and half round carving tools which makes fine detailed wood removal easier. Wood scrapers also are a huge help.
After using multiple scrapers & sand paper, the stock channel, lock and tang are smooth and ready to be bedded later on in the build.
With the stock channel ready, I moved onto the lock and was very surprised to see that this rifle, only needed sand paper and a little rubbing in order for the lock to drop right into place. I did open up the inletting a little towards the front. Once I wet sand, stain, apply finish, the wood will swell and cause a tight fit, which then causes you to have to go back with a scraper and remove a little finish. I prefer to avoid removing finish whenever possible.
Moving on to the nose cap, I did both, file down the wood and de-burr the inside of the nose cap. We can see here in the wood that if we tried to simply put the nose cap over the wood, we would be in trouble as the burrs or castings, is course and interfering with the wood to metal fit. Two things can actually be done. #1 is to remove the burrs with a small dremmel tool which is very easy. #2 you can actually measure how much slag there is in the nose cap. Say it it is 1/8" long, simply remove 1/8" or slightly more from the wood of the stock. I used the dremmel way and removed the brass slag that was left over from casting.
Also, the nose cap had to be widened just a bit in order for the barrel to slip down in between the nose cap.
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