And any guess on what type of wood I have here?



Greg

Walnut crotch wood in the butt. Forend appears more straight grained. MB

Nice job, custom shapes and checkering. I'd be interested to know who is still doing this quality of stock work for hire.

MB, I think you may be right about the crotch walnut! Here's a photo of the left side.

It sure looks good!

This one has a nice stock, but ain’t near that purty.

Now, I love that look. Beautiful!

Check out this butt plate. I'm new to the 99, but I had never seen one like this.

Looks Winchester.

It's a beautiful stock. I'll have to be honest, I'm not taken with the radical Monte Carlo stock designs. I'm with some such rifles wearing that stock pattern, mostly bolt actions. To me the presentation a bit disproportionate. Yet to admire them as, for the most part, fifties & sixties vintage 'era pieces'.. Yours is indeed nice & a handsome Savage! The butt plate itself is super! The installation fitment, as work of art!

My take
Best & Stay Safe!
John

I just picked up a 99 with an original stock modified for that exact buttplate. As buttplates go, they are kind of cool. Still rather have the original on mine.

Niedner style butt plate. Designed by A.O.Niedner, an early 20th century gunsmith and rifle maker.

"Niedner style butt plate. Designed by A.O.Niedner, an early 20th century gunsmith and rifle maker."


Thank you for sharing that info. I'm reading about Niedner now.

And the screws arent indexed!

Beautiful work who ever did it. Crotch walnut for sure. Know a Winchester collector who had some Model 70's and 94's with that same type wood. See rifles and shotguns at gun shows once in a while with that type of wood. Usually very $$$$. I do like that butt plate. The Monte Carlo style is different, not something normally seen on a 99, but neither is that wood or butt plate. What model is the frame and what caliber.

1949 EG and .250-3000

With such attention to every other detail, those protruding screwheads are a puzzlement to me.

Yeah, it is puzzling. The reference to index is a in forum running joke ,sort of!

Ol' squeeler be like, wudda hell is wiff dem screws bein all outa whack anyhows?? POS!

Just found mine.. same basic shape, but the cross-hatching and screwholes are different. Mine appears to be a pre-64 Winchester model 70 buttplate. So not exactly the same, sorry.

Would this considered crotch walnut?

I would say yes, and very nice at that. Most new wood like that is coming in from Turkey. If'n you gots to replace a stock , might as well go nice!
Wish i could see that french skip better, might know the hand that did it.

Closeup

Don't recognize the hand but nice job. Double border is smart for covering overruns. One of my personal least favorite cuts, the french skip, only because i am a lazy cutter! Like the pattern and gun bigley!

Factory stamped checkering is that a PE?

No, it is a 1977 99C, .22-250 Remington

Yes and very nicely sawn.

Whenever you get 2 completely different grains like that it was most likely sawn from the crotch of a tree.

Beautiful piece of wood. It deserved hand cut checkering.

Not pressed.

If that is not pressed checking then I will modify my comments above.

It deserved BETTER hand cut checkering

Close up of checkering.

KeithNyst

I was researching after Magnum Bob told me it was crotch Walnut and I found a website where a guy was making bass guitars from crotch Walnut and the wood looked identical to your stock. Beautiful!

Not trying to fight but if you look close at several spots on the finger guard radius of the pattern you can pick out overruns. That checkering in my opinion has been flooded with so much finish it looks like pressed. The inner bead border , inboard of the v groove finish border can' t be stamped. Granted my eyes are so bad i could be fos but thats what i see, after 50 years of scratching lines in wood. Cleaned up that checkering could be stunning.
Monte Kennedy and Bob Brownell were masters of the french skip.

Murray's comments on the 99C, pgs. 3-68&69
o 1965 99C introduced, impressed-checkering
o 1976 Skipped-checkered pattern adopted
o 1980 cut checkered stocks

In 1976 the 99CD was catalogued as "hand checkered" as a special feature. Trust me that this is pressed checkering. Absolutely beautiful wood on it.

Guess i need more eye surgery. Or a new laptop. Been viewing on a little tablet.

The went back and forth from pressed to cut, from machine cut to hand cut. It gets confusing

this sort of wood (especially American black walnut) is getting harder to come by, but it's only ever been had as a premium grade of wood (read: expensive)

JeffG

That has to represent a lot of years of growth. And it's going to take that many years for another one to replace it.

measuring the age of trees like that bumps into centuries

Black walnut is shade intolerant so most likely a specimen like that came from a park, a cemetary or out of somebody's yard. It is not found in mature forests, but in open areas and edges or in managed monoculture stands.

Very uncommon to find one that big and old that doesn't have a least some heart rot.

Winchester began to have a difficult time sourcing quality American black walnut in the mid 1950’s.

Hanco, what year, model and caliber is your gun?

Quick hi-jack: OP - What mill did you use to saw that out ?

The first thing I did after buying this gun was order a copy of David Royal's book, A Collector's Guide to the Savage 99 Rifle. My book arrived before my new old gun! The gun was shipped USPS Priority from Vermont to Alabama and it took 12 days to arrive. For a while there I was thinking it was on a slow boat from China.

From the book I learned my gun was made in 1949, but nothing I was reading matched up with the stock, checkering, pistol grip and cap, butt plate and forearm of this gun. Identifying the letter designation of the model from the book was perplexing, as some of the identifiers were related to the wood.

Thanks to Calhoun I learned my gun is a 99EG with an after-market wood upgrade. Thanks to Magnum Bob I know the wood is Walnut crotch wood and after researching, I'm convinced this is not the Turkish Walnut we've seen so much of in the last 30 to 40 years.



The fancy butt plate was unlike any of the factory butt plates shown in the book. Pocono Jack let me know that it is a Niedner style butt plate, designed by A.O.Niedner, an early 20th century gunsmith and rifle maker. That info was really helpful.

With such attention to every other detail like the widows peak, those protruding screwheads in the photos were a puzzlement to me. Turns out they just weren't seated well. Evidently someone else removed the plate to investigate as I did when the gun arrived and over-cautiously tightened them too little.

I'm going out on a limb and guessing the modifications were done in the '50s. It's like someone took a near new '48 Panhead and made a chopper out of it.

We all speculate to some extent when we buy an old gun. I think I have an $800 gun with $800 worth of furniture on it. Please smile when you laugh. But I will say this. I've already had $1,600 worth of fun in just two short weeks!



THANK YOU ALL FOR YOUR HELP!

That is a beautiful rifle! Thank you for sharing.
I love custom wood on rifles and just recently I was lucky enough to land one in 250-3000 (not as nice as yours!)
That rifle would look good in just about any fine gun collection! A real piece of functional art.
If you decide it's not for you, please let me know. I have just the gun rack to put it in!

Life is far too short to hunt with an ugly gun!

Best,
Ed

Thanks Ed.

I forgot to share this photo of the custom-made steel pistol grip cap that was designed to perfectly match the fancy butt plate.

Another A.O. Niedner design.

..and if you use star-drive deck screws it's way easier to index 'em..