Inletting a foreend

[JeffinNZ]

Team.

I have a nice piece of well seasoned walnut to restock my .310 Martini Cadet. How does one go about inletting a foreend for a tapering round barrel? I have access to a table saw and a router plus lots of hand tools.

All suggestions appreciated.

[btroj]

You pack it up with the barrel and ship it to someone who knows what they are doing? That is what I would do. I know my limitations.

[docone31]

Jeff, Smoke the barrel, and just start chipping away.
Just relieve the smoked parts. It does not take long.

[Casting Timmy]

You can use the router too to speed it up a little, just make sure your bit is undersized as compared to the barrel and then cut out the complete channel.

[flounderman]

you can make an initial cut down the center of the blank. not as deep as it will finish. you can work both side of this with a 1 inch, sharp, chisel to widen the shoulders. most of your chisel work will be by pushing and shaving, across the grain. once you have a 1/2 inch chanel, you use inletting black, lamp black, vasaline and lipstick mixture, something that will mark the wood when you coat the barrel with it and fit the barrel to the blank. you go slow and keep removing the marked areas. you can make a scraper with a rounded end, sharpen just one side. it can be bent at right angles on the end or flat. fisher makes a two ended flat one with a different size round end on each end. these are not sharpened, but the edges of the ends are sharp on each side. you do the initial shaping shaving across the grain with the wide chisel, finish by scrapeing down the chanel with the scrapers. sand paper to finish. keep fitting the barrel and removing the marked wood and don't take too much at one time. you can do this without using a mallet and will have less chanch of making a mistake if you don't use one. You can always coat the barrel with release and glass the barrel chanel if you need to. inlet the barrel chanel before you do anything to the rest of the blank.

[MBTcustom]

Jeff, you need a powerful dremel tool of some sort (look up the craftsman all-in-one). YOu need several good quality wood rasps and files. You need a good set of chisels. You need an inletting tool like this:
http://www.brownells.com/.aspx/pid=6796/Product/BARREL-BEDDING-TOOL
Good tools will make it go so much quicker.
Here are some pictures of the first stock that I ever made, and one of the more extensive customization jobs I have ever done. This is an air rifle that the customer wanted to have a small on-board scuba tank installed and a special stock to hold them together as a unit. (hey, I just do what they ask OK?) Anyway, I doubt you will ever have anything give you as much trouble as this project gave me. It took three years on and off to complete, and I did it without most of the nice tools mentioned above.
http://i1120.photobucket.com/albums/l481/goodsteel/IMG_3306.jpg
http://i1120.photobucket.com/albums/l481/goodsteel/044.jpg
http://i1120.photobucket.com/albums/l481/goodsteel/050.jpg
Don't bust on me too hard, I know there are folks like waksupi that are going to shudder when they see this monstrosity, but it was my first attempt, and I was a little hampered by the customers wishes. Also, I learned quite a lot on that project and if I ever have it to do again, there are many things that I would do different (like investing in the right tools!), but it works, and the guy was happy as a clam when I delivered. I guess what I'm saying is, if I can do this on my first try then surly you can take care of your stock endeavors and come out with a usable piece of furniture.
Go for it!

[bruce drake]

Measure twice and cut once. It took a lot of slow work with several hand chisels before I was satisfied with the barrel channel of a Mauser I redid to a bull barrel configuration.

Bruce

[Mk42gunner]

Used hacksaw blades make decent scrapers after you grind the teeth off. They can be shaped however you want them and aren't hard to sharpen. A propane torch will provide enough heat to bend the blade without snapping it.

Dremels are tools of the devel when inletting wood.

Robert

[Tokarev]

The proper way to treat nice wood is with a good set of round and flat chisels. The pros do not use power tools on nice wood.

Mk42gunner+1! Used hacksaw blades can be soldered onto rods or bars of mild steel and make nice scrapers that you can shape to whatever form or radius you need, I make improvised wood lathe chisels that way all the time. I braze them to the rods with silver solder and quench while they are red hot.

And you need a good curved knife with about 10"x1" handle. A metal lathe parting tool inserts can be used to make excellent woodworking knives.

[dpaultx]

Stock inletting scrapers can be made from almost any sort of decent tool/spring steel stock. Even tooling intended for other purposes can be adapted for use as stock scrapers.

This is a 3/8" diameter carbide insert cutter that is screw mounted to a 1/4" steel rod, set in a 9" maple handle, for use as an internal bowl scraper on a wood lathe. The whole tool is right at 18" in length, and it also makes a fine stock inletting tool for getting into tight curved areas.

http://img15.imageshack.us/img15/1820/lathecarbide02.jpg

The carbide inserts are available in a multitude of different sizes and shapes (round, square, diamond, trapezoidal, etc.) and can sometimes be picked up for almost nothing on eBay or as "discarded" tooling. A carbide cutter that has become too "dull" for cutting steel, still has a lot of life left in it as a wood working instrument.

Doug

[Char-Gar]

In the old days, a "V" was cut in the mid-line with a fine tooth hand saw to provide a place to start the barrel inlet. I suppose one could use a router for a starting channel.

I have inletted a dozen or more barrel using nothing but hand held scrapers. I use the round Jerry Fisher design, as sold by Brownells. I use Prussian Blue as a spoting compound, but there are others. This is very slow and tedious work to do it this way, but there is no way you can remove to much wood. I would not let a Dremel or any other power tool anywhere near my rifle stock.

Well, that is not entirely true. I will use a Dremel with a small sanding disc to do some of the round wood removal from the outside of the stock. But stop long before the final dimensions and go to hand tools. The sanding disc can put grooves in the wood that are deeper than you think.

[MtGun44]

Candle soot and scraping slowly, as has been said. Easy to take a touch more off, hard to
put it back on. Soot and fit often.

Bill

[KCSO]

Since I just did a Martini 12/15 I will give you my process. First have some tools, I have scrapers from Brownell's and a set of Grobet round barrel channel files. Lacking the files a chunk of old barrel stock slightly smaller than your intended channel with sand paper glued on will work. I rout a center line with a router bit slightly smaller than the smalled diameter of the barrel and then using commercial inletting black thinned with vaseline I go to work. coat the barrel and TAP it with a wooden mallet and scrap off the black spots until the barrel is close to the bottom of the inlet. You need to be carefull as what you are looking for is full contact and as the barrel goes down you need take material off the bottom more than the sides. You want, when the barrel is all the way in to have an even black all over, with no gaps at the sides. it is kind of tricky and you want to inlet a small scrap or two firs so you get the idea. No gaps at the sides and black to the bottom of the inlet.

If you have acess to old barrel stock a barrel smaller than your barrel to inlet with a layer of sandpaper glued on works nice on a single shot fore end to get you real close. You can clamp the forestock in the vise and sand away. I have several pieces that I have put handles on just for this kind of work.

[scb]

Over the last 30 years these are the best I've used.
http://www.brownells.com/.aspx/pid=6796/Product/BARREL-BEDDING-TOOL
If you can get them where you are.

[Gunfreak25]

All really great tips everybody!

[geargnasher]

You have to really watch it if you use a router, they tend to blow out chunks on the trailing side of the cutter.

I prefer to jig up the blank against a straight board, shim the board against the stock so that it's exactly parallel to the barrel channel and flush with the top of the stock, then run it against the table saw fence and make a cut down the middle to almost the finished depth of the channel, then adjust the shims to the correct barrel taper and make shallower cuts on each side, about halfway between the finished edges of the channel and the center cut, again just shy of the finished depth at that radius. Then I clamp a straightedge on the edge of the channel and score a cut with a sharp knife to break the grain at the surface, this helps prevent chipping the edge of the channel and gives a "work to" mark.

After all that, I take a flat chisel and pop the two ribs out of the channel (between the three cuts) and start shaving across the grain per earlier descriptions. When I get it whittled out enough to do so, I then use a Brownell's bedding scraper (the one with the sharpened discs all in a row) and clean the channel up carefully. When it starts getting close, I do the smoke thing and continue to shave it until it's a tight fit, then use sandpaper wrapped around dowells to finish the job.

I did one stock for a straight bull barrel using mostly the table saw, making repeated passes and micro-depth adjustments until I had the channel carved out, then it cleaned up quickly with only sandpaper on a mandrel. I'd rather spend the time on the table saw than time with a chisel any day, but you need a GOOD table saw and lots of patience, checking each blade/fence adjustment with the blade stopped before committing to the cut.

Gear