Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing rifle stock duplicating machine

just curious, but who makes 'em & sells 'em???

thanks

Start googling for Hoenig. Dakota also does or did sell them.

Here You Go

http://www.terrco.com/ter_6.htm

Hope this helps
Andrew

Exactly what do you want to accomplish?

Prices range from $2,000 to $200,000.

thinking i might want to make some stocks, but probably not enough volume to justify the expense. as i said, just curious... and since last prone stock that was sent off as a pattern disappeared, got to thinking maybe ought to do it myself....

thanks.

You don't need a duplicator to make stocks...

Try this. www.copycarver.com. $20 for the plans, $175 for materials, and an afternoon to build. Mine works great.

No you don't have to have a duplicator, but after I made my first using the "just cut away everything that don't look like a gunstock" method, I started seriously looking at them. After getting the pattern boards and fixtures made for the copy carver, I can rough out a stock in 1/8 the time it took me with the bandsaw and shapers on that first one. So I guess the issue is how much time you want (have) to spend. Also the duplicator is a nifty machine to have in the shop for other projects. I plan on keeping mine. If anyone is interested I can send some pics of the setups required for stocks and give some tips to use during construction- this machine needs to be slightly modified from it's original design for gunstocks.

We have one but dont use it much. It is however an awesome machine

That thing looks pretty neat. It looks simple enough to make. Usually whenever I run across these kind of things I think that they are gimmicks to get your money, but that one looks like it works as advertised...


SS

I used to design commercial 3, 4 and 5-axis routers for woodworking and carving. We sold a few for small stuff like custom guitars. I digitized a few gunstocks and duplicated them.

Questions for everyone:

What would you pay for a small CNC machine which could digitize, warp, customize and cut a new stock with alterted dimensions?

What would you pay the owner of such a machine to cut your stock out?

Wow Lee24, now yer gittin hi-tech on us. What you are proposing sounds kinda expensive for a guy like me just doing this for a hobby. I was asking around before I made my duplicator what would be the cost to take my wood and rough out/semi-inlet it for my Encore butt and forearm. The prices ranged from $100 to $175. I figured the guy with the fastest machine had the lowest cost?? When you talk about digitizing it reminds me of the Faro laser tracker we have at the mill. This machine cost over $100,000. Sure would have to turn out a bunch of stocks to come out on that deal.

I think that's why stockmakers still do it by hand or by a mechanical duplicator, like the Dakota, which costs about $10,000. A 24x36x12 envelope CNC machine would probably cost $20,000. The first one that size I designed sold for $38,000 in 1984. The buyer made award plaques on the side. He paid for the machine in a month and almost worked himself to death.

Sears used to sell a spindle duplicator which would turn a ballister newell and duplicate it, even a 4-ribbon spiral, which you cannot do on a wood lathe. It only cost $200.00 back in the 1970s. It might not have enough clearance to turn the stock blank.

A manual 1 station pantograph router could copy one side of the stock at a time in 4 operations, doing the inletting with a plunge router in multilple setups. That would be cheap to build for hobby use $200.00), but a good set of linear dustproof ways for daily use would cost $2,000, plus the same for the rest of the machine.

$100 to 175.00 for someone to copy your stock on a quality machine that holds close to 1/100 of an inch is very reasonable, especially when you are playing with a $500 blank.

Lee, Place called Gunstocks, Inc. is one of them. They are selling some nice semi-finished wood at a reasonable price. I don't know which machine they have. That guy back in '84 must not have slept for a month, paying for a $38000 machine making plaques.

Those machines will cut 100 inches a minute and hold 0.01 inch over a 30-foot run, so the biggest problem with simple 2D stuff is keeping the machine loaded and the sawdust removed. A big machine cutting aluminum wing spars will run a 10-hp water-cooled variable speed router.

A custom guitar maker bought one and used it to cut mother of pearl and wood and the inlays into guitar necks. After Steinway burned, they brought back a retired builder and we programmed a machine from the drawings he created and repaired, to cut the new soundboards.

Well it's a good thing the old craftsman had not passed on. Then the designs would have been lost, or could you have copied them from some previously made guitars?

The old craftsman was at Steinway. The guitar maker was a one-man shop in NY City. He was good, but some things you just cannot do by hand, such as cutting out the signature of a musician in mother of pearl and inletting it perfectly in the neck of a guitar.

Other things, like carving a spindle for a poster bed with palmetto trees and rice leaves, or cutting out the curved panels for yacht interior, is a way to increase sales to meet demand when you only have one person capable of doing such by hand, and free him up to create some new designs. Also, it keeps such work from going to China, where it is cheaply imitated in inferior woods.