Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats Mauser build for my son

let me show you what I was able to get done this weekend.

For grins I wanted to weigh the stock before i did any work on it. I put it on my digital scale and it came out to 2lbs, 14.8oz. almost 3 pounds of walnut.



First a little about the inletting. I saw this method somewhere else and used it and it works great. I 'paint' the area of the metal im working on inletting with a dry erase marker. Its not near as messy as inletting black and in my opinion safer than a candle or oil lamp.


After getting the dry erase on, just put it in the stock and give a good whack with a wooden mallet. You can see that very little of the wood in the action area needed to be removed:


I used red on the barrel:


I'm trying to show here which way to use the chisel to cut very shallow.


Overall I'm really happy with the quality of inletting from Richards. I only have 3 areas I may want to do something about. First is the area around the front screw hole in the bottom metal. The inletting from Richards got a little out on this:


The second area is on the top of the stock, just behind the receiver and under the safety shroud:


The third area I don't have a photo of yet, but it's the area just in front of the bolt release on the side. The part that would be the little piece left between the release and the thumb cut out. I'll get a pic. I wish it were a bit longer back toward the release. As it it there won't be much wood left there. Not sure if i want to try to add a bit to give it more to see or do away with that little raised portion all together.

After getting the action and bottom metal inletted, I started on the outside with the grip and wrist of the stock. As sent from Richards the end of the grip where the grip cap would be had some extra on it. First stop was to go back to my dad's place and cut that. In order to make it smooth and even I used the front magazine screw hole and the trigger slot cut out itself to pass some screws through and into a 2x4 piece of scrap using some large fender washers to hold it snug. The 2x4 have me a flat area to rest on the bandsaw table. I lined up the cut and carefully cut the dingus off the pistol grip: