Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Mausers and Military Rifles Richards Microfit 2nd and a Mark X

In a recent thread MrFixit decided to catalog his doings as he builds a rifle for his son. I've commented more than once that his thread is what I thought this board should embody, so, it's time for me to 'put my money where my mouth is'...so to speak. I'll go ahead and confess an appreciation for the extra work that MrFixit put into his posts just from the documentarian point of view. I'm wading into those same waters here.

I purchased a Richards Microfit 2nd gunstock (Claro Walnut AA with Mark X inletting) this past June, and I received it in early August. Being self employed and rather busy, I put it away with an eye on November. November came and went, and now I've finally set to it.

Richards describes the stock as having African Rosewood. I realize that Bubinga is often referred to as African Rosewood, but, it's not a rosewood, and I'm not a fan of Bubinga (in this particular use case). It'll be coming off. The pad is a Remington pad, and that's coming off as well.

Best I can tell there are two primary reasons why this stock ended up a 2nd. It seems that when they flipped the stock over on the CNC they didn't do quite the perfect job aligning the stock on all its previous axes. The result is a ledge formed by the cutter on opposite inlets and on opposite sides while not being aligned as before. Don't know how that'll impact the inletting I have to do but we will see. In addition to the off axis cutting, the butt of the stock has some micro checking in it. The checks run across the grain in some pretty random directions. It looks like they might have attempted to eliminate them with some CA glue and sandpaper, but it didn't work from a cosmetic point of view. That's on the list of things to fix. I don't know if I can make the checking literally disappear, but we will see.

Condition of the stock when I received it back in August: