![]() If you’re lucky and the gun is fairly new you may be able to stop here. Let the oven cleaner work for at least twenty minuets, wash it off, let the stock dry, and repeat as often as necessary. Any darker areas in the inletting, the broken sections, the front where the receiver meets the wood and the end of the butt that was under the buttplate or recoil pad get sprayed with oven cleaner. When I am sure I have removed as much dirt and oil as the soap will get, I evaluate the stock. Usually the end grain and inletting for tangs, trigger plates and sidelocks, if present, require extra attention. I will often do this several times allowing the stock to air dry between water boarding sessions, concentrating on any areas that are still darker than the others. After giving it a good scrub, rinse it in hot water and dry it off with an old towel. This operation will remove dirt, grease, grime, oil, and any oil-based finish. Any soap will do and any stiff nylon brush will be just fine. ![]() Once the stock is off the gun and all we have is the wood, start the enhanced interrogation with what I will call “water boarding.” Scrub the living daylights out of the wooden stock using hot water, soap, and a cleaning brush. I can’t anticipate every possible combination of problems so I will simply address wood preparation that will allow an adhesive to work. Now, you may simply have a cracked stock with or without missing pieces of wood or you may have one actually broken in two or more pieces. Remove the stock from the gun and take off all butt plates, recoil pads, grip caps, nuts, bolts, nails, rawhide, clamps, plastic model airplane parts or whatever type of old repair material. Now that we have looked at what doesn’t work, let’s take a look at something that does. As the screws vibrate and move they leave more damage than you started with. Recoil vibration through the wood loosens them and walnut is soft enough to crack around them. I’ll bet you see oil bubbling up to the surface.īesides being ugly, screws in the stock never seem to help for long. If you don’t believe this, next time you have cleaned up an oily stock with oven cleaner try heating the stock over a stove or with a heat gun. If you use one of these and glue up the stock, chances are that within a few weeks more oil will migrate to the surface and the joint will eventually fail when the oil soaks into the wood where it is in contact with the glue. Oven cleaner, paint stripper and bleach are just a few of those I have used. There are plenty of products on the market that are great at removing oil on or near the surface. You may think you already know how to do that. So, the first job in repairing a stock is to remove every possible trace of oil from the wood. The first lesson in stock repair is that glue, no matter how good, will not stick to oil. In a lot of old doubles, the oil itself has been a contributing factor in the stock breaking in the first place. Any gun not stored muzzle down is eventually going to have the stock become oil soaked. Oil originally swabbed into the bore to prevent rust has run down the stock and been soaked up by the wood. Over time the wood has absorbed a lot of oil. The reason for the failure is generally simple to detect. Many of these repairs were brilliantly thought out and expertly executed but still failed and even if they held they were downright ugly. Strips of wood or metal inletted across the break and screwed and or glued in place, rawhide wraps, metal bands and sometimes a combination of several of these attempts and there is always evidence of glue-lots and lots of glue. ![]() They come in with wire wrapped around the broken wrist like a cast. The few that I quote a repair on are generally of sentimental value to the owner and are obscure or rare enough that no replacements stocks are available for them. Generally, by the time the gun gets to me the owner has given up hope and simply wants to sell the gun. ![]() When the gun breaks in the same place a time or two they give up the job and put stock repair into the black arts file. Based on the number of badly repaired old stocks that I have worked on, most folks think all it takes is some glue and perhaps a few screws and a splint or two. How many old stocks have you seen that were broken at the wrist, repaired and then broken again? If you have been around guns for very long I’m sure you have seen your share. ![]()
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