Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats Documenting a build--.280 Rem in Classic American style

A major breakthrough in progress...



So my ally on this project has been D'Arcy Echols. He needed a lefty Legend McMillan stock blank for a client quicker than he could get it from McMillan, and so I traded him one in exchange for him duplicating a stock off my pattern. The unfortunate part of the deal for him (but the absolutely great part for me) is that I would take my pattern by and he would tell me what was not right yet. I would go home, fix whatever was deficient, and then return for another lesson in remedial stock building. He was kind enough to put up with maybe a half dozen of those visits. When he said it was ready to go, I took a blank over.

He got it rough cut while I was overseas, and offered me the chance to watch as he did the final shaping. He uses a Hoenig pantograph, which mounts the stock and pattern in rotating steadyrests to ensure that the stock is not deflected by the pressure of the cutter. The result is that he can cut to .003" over. It did take over three hours, and three different depths of cutting, and I'll bet he changed cutters 25 times to properly get into some corner of the stock.

I have used a number of semi-inlet blanks before, but never one cut this close. It greatly sped up my work. D'Arcy thinks he can inlet a stock off this pantograph in 3 hours, it took me almost 8, which might be a third of the time I have spent on others.

The wood is everything I might have hoped for--now I need to just take my time and not screw it up.

(I wet the stock with mineral spirits for the photos.)