From Firewood to a Gunstock
One fine day I got an email from a forum member requesting some stock work services of mine. He said he had a stock for his Dutch Beaumont rifle that needed some repair work. The pictures he sent me showed the rifle assembled, and a side view of the "crack" on the left side of the stock. The crack looked to be very old, and was badly repaired with elmers wood glue probably 20 maybe 30 years ago. So a week or two later and I had his stock at my house. Only when I opened the box, I found I had not one, but two stocks! :lol: The vibrations and shock just from shipping the thing to me must have cracked it in two, because he said it wasn't broken in two before he sent it. That alone shows how bad of a job glue does to hold a stock together. So the repairing began...Here's 2 pictures of the stock with that nasty glue everywhere inside of it. Actually I think I already had some of the glue removed at this stage..
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Here is the stock after I worked for a few days removing as much glue as I could with KleanStrip Stripper. For removing glue, tough polyurethanes, and other old epoxies I use the Stripper in the gold can, it's alot stronger than the Stripper in the red can.
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To clamp this stock together you need to make yourself a couple of wooden blocks for support and protection from the clamps. The round piece is from an old toilet plunger and fits the barrel channel like a glove, I cut a flat spot ontop so the clamp has something to sit level on. The bottom piece is just a scrap piece of pine I had laying around, using a hacksaw, make several deep cuts going parallel with the piece, then use a screwdriver or wood chisel and scrap out the wood, like so. This is for the bottom of the stock, and the cutout helps it to "cup" the stock and prevent it from slipping.
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When I do stock work, I use Devcon 2 ton clear epoxy weld with the 30 minute work time. This stuff is about as close to acraglas you can get without using acraglas. However, I would recommend acraglas over the Devcon. When bought in volume acraglas will also be a good bit cheaper, since the Devcon now runs me $5 a tube. I have never had a repair break or fail when using Devcon, it's good stuff especially when your on the go and don't have the room or time to mix up the acraglas.
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Before applying your resin, test clamp your broken pieces together, to see how long it takes to you clamp the area, and how well it will clamp down. I had to remove a tiny sliver of wood between the two halves to get them to fit together. It was a very old break, did not match up, and the two halves swelled a little bit when I was removing the glue from them days earlier. After test clamping, I cleaned both area's very well with denatured alcohol, applied a good layer of resin on the two halves, and clamped them down for the night. Use waxpaper to keep the top dowel from sticking to the barrel channel.
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The next morning I unclamped everything, and inspected my repairs.
Here's the stock before cleaning up my repair work.
http://i32.tinypic.com/108fgah.jpg
Those dents inside the barrel channel, they were there before my work. My guess is the bozo who repaired the stock years ago with glue, just clamped the two pieces together without using any wood blocks for protection, so they are most likely clamp marks.
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http://i30.tinypic.com/24ywemc.jpg
Now, I still had to strip the stock and give it a complete refinish, so I wasn't worried about cleaning up my repair work just yet. During stripping, I purposely applied stripper to the seam of my repair, this removed any resin that had seeped out during clamping. With this resin now out of the edges of the seam, I could go back later with my "dyed" epoxy mix and refill the seam to properly hide the repair into the stocks finish. My "dyed" resin is just a mix of a little lamp black soot (don't use candle soot as it has an oily residue) mixed in with the resin to turn it black, so it's not clear when it dries.
Stupid me forgot to take any pictures of the stripping and finishing process. After stripping the entire stock, I steamed the dents, made 2 last repairs, filled in the seam of the repair with my dyed resin, cleaned all my repair work up, gave the stock a light sanding to even it out as well as smooth the grain out, stained the stock with Chestnut Ridge Military Stock stain (alcohol based), let it dry 24 hours, buffed very well with 0000 superfine steel wool, and gave it 3 hand rubbed coats of pure tung oil, 24 hours between coats, and 3 days dry time on the last coat before hand rubbing in a good coat of Johnsons paste wax, let that dry 1 day, and buff it off very well.
Continuation down the page.......
