Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Marlin .444 project

Here's the forend nearly in. You can see the holes in the cap don't quite yet line up with the holes in the tenon. You get the idea. Two more lifetimes of color transfer and chiseling and it was fitted.


Next came thinning that chubby thing down. I don't know who out there enjoys these giant forends Marlin put on their wares, but it's not me. It's remarkable how much difference in feel you can accomplish by taking off an eighth of an inch here or a sixteenth there. The first part of this process was determining exactly how much thinner I wanted it and then rasping the bottom down to a level flat in order to create a known. Once that was done I rasped the top of the forend, next to the barrel channel down to its final thickness. Then I rasped another parallel flat on either side of the bottom flat. Only then did I begin rasping the entire forend, rounding things off to join the flats and take them from flat to round. Important! Be sure to leave a smidge of extra wood in order to account for final sanding. You can also see the black acraglas in the wood under the cap. I had to glass bed the barrel channel because the TK barrel is skinnier than the barrel this forend was originally used with. In the process I gunked some epoxy all over the end cap inlet and just went with it.