Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Simple fix for stock crack?

I have a Win M70 Featherweight made most likely somewhere between 2000 and 2006. Which means it has "hot glue" bedding which I just spent a ridiculous amount of time removing.

Anyway, I was getting ready to glass bed the action when I took a closer look and discovered a crack between the front screw hole and the magazine well.

I've never bedded a rifle before - will the bedding around the screw hole and in the recoil lug recess stabilize the crack and prevent it from spreading?

Do I need to drill out the crack at any location and apply bedding compound?

Here's a pic of the problem:


And one from a different angle:


Considering my lack of experience in this field, what is the simplest permanent solution?

Cross bolts would be the best solution, but might be above your abilities and may look kind of odd on a Featherweight rifle.

One thing I would try is to carve out a groove about 1/4" wide and about 1/2" deep with a sharp chisel perpendicular to the crack. Place some stiff metal rods or something similar in the groove and bed as usual, making sure to fill the groove with bedding compound to encapsulate the rods to stabilize the crack. The rods should have some "grip" like a coarse surface from 40 grip sandpaper or the like or a couple grooves cut in them with a grinder or hacksaw.

Should take care of the problem and will never show.

Bob

I would just Dremel the crack as deep as feels right, inside out it's hard to go too far, and fill with Acraglas Gel or whatever bedding compound you choose. It's epoxy and the bond is stronger than the wood. Hint: Rub the bond area with a little epoxy before filling to assure good contact and adhesion. Then bed with enough epoxy behind the recoil lug to form a pad thick enough to spread recoil force evenly. The action screws should not touch the wood.

Sorry Bob, but the notion of metal rods to strengthen crossgrain wood cracks ended with the invention of epoxy. Crossbolts have been shown to anything but strengthen a stock, too.

Little crack like that should have some wood ground out and simply bedded with epoxy stiffened with glass fibers...
art

btw, been fishing the American River here on Kodiak the last few days. We fished there as you recall the day I did my level best to kill you!

Art, so, was the fishing better than the day we went? (I hope so)
I'd love to fish Kodiak with you again. Great fishing and sightseeing, but I'll drive this time....

I would personally use the epoxy, with the glass fibers, but I would probably still drop in a couple rods of some sort- maybe pieces of 8 penny nails? OR??????? Old habits die hard.

If anything in this thread- Crack in stock Q -helps, you're welcome.

(I haven't looked in on my repair lately. Perhaps I'll get around to it, though, before the 30 years are up.)

That's really not going to add any strength to the repair, since it would only be "floating" in the Epoxy

Epoxy alone is the way to go, and a Dremel instead of a chisel, making the bottom of the groove a little wider than the top

The fishing was so good even Rick Bin was catching so many fish the on-lookers were envious... We had a very good time.

The best idea for tougheners I have seen in a very long time was from saddlesore (IIRC) and he suggested loops of high tech fishing braid.

The nails would be worse than useless as temp changes would work the bond between the two.

Sounds like a great idea- fishing braid in the epoxy. I'll have to try that one if I get a cracked stock again.

Miss the fishing, though. Any bears about?

We saw a total of three while deer hunting one day but none on the rivers. I am just a handful shy of 100 brown bears seen this year so far

If you feel the need for fillers, use fiberglass tape, but on a small repair it's still not adding much strength

Bedding compound is already filled. Talc, milled glass, nylon, atomized metal, whatever. For unseen structural repairs that need gap filling flocked cotton fiber with plain epoxy resin is very tough stuff. Colloidal silica is considered a structural filler but I've never worked with the stuff. Supposed to be smoother, flocked cotton can be a little bit lumpy.

Then there's always JB Weld.

Instead of fishing braid I've used a long filament cut from fiberglass tape laid in a figure 8 shape into a bowtie shaped hollow perpendicular to the crack. Fiberglass is designed to work with epoxy; it will wet and penetrate the strands of fiberglass. Epoxy won't do this with fishing braid...

Well yes and no. Glass for laying up with epoxy has a surface treatment to aid adhesion (wetting out). So is Kevlar and IIRC it's more important. But then we're not talking about building an aircraft here.

I'm no expert, but my 2-cents worth says go to a hobby store and get a hypodermic needle and inject epoxy straight into the crack. I'd use acrglass, but not the gel. It would help if you could gently open the crack just enough to aid in injecting the epoxy. Close it up, clamp and give the epoxy full time to cure. Best of luck, you should be able to save the stock.

PS - Gorilla glue should work good too. It should be able to create a bond stronger than the wood and be waterproof.

Ixnay on just injecting epoxy into the crack without grinding some of it away to expose fresh wood. Who knows what might be down in there that would impede a good bond.

dremel tool with a small burr or drill with as tiny a bit as possible , cut into the crack as deep as you dare and use air to blow in epoxy, (outside cause it will blow it all over everything in shop), clamp and let dry them bed as normal

One other idea, if you want to try it, is to get it nice an' warm so th' grain opens up a bit, and use Crazy Glue in the crack. This technique is used on guitars very often, and works really well. The glue wicks down into the deepest recesses of the crack, apparently, and solidifies very well, and is waterproof when dry. A little pressure from the sides to close the gap after applying the glue seems to help according to some. It's amazing what I've seen done with cyanoacryllics and wood.

When dry, scrape or cut off the excess down to the surrounding wood, and it'll probably hold 'till the cows come home.

Luthiers (guitar repairmen) use this 'trick' a lot. I've seen valuable vintage guitars fixed this way and with a good refin
job, they look EXACTLY like the original. Amazing stuff, and folks who play guitar are MUCH more critical of the way their nice old vintage guitars play and sound than we shooters will ever be about our rifles.

FWIW.

Except cyanoacrylate is very low in shock resistance which is what stocks have to deal with... guitars, not so much.

Yeah. I repaired two tang cracks with CA and had to re-do them in short order.