Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing making a widow's ' peak forend tip

I've been quite poor at making a good one lately so I built this tool to broach the female side of things.







It makes a quite precise cavity for the "peak"



All one has to do then is match it with an endmill in the milling machine



glue it together

[img]http://www.hunt101.com/data/500/medium/IMG_20366.JPG[/img]

And flush sand it
[img]http://www.hunt101.com/data/500/medium/IMG_20413.JPG[/img]


one could even get carried away with this tool.....he might find uses for it that are unconventional

[img]http://www.hunt101.com/data/500/medium/IMG_20454.JPG[/img]

If one must have a bad habit this is one of the better ones





Making half round/half octagon barrels with vented ribs is among the worst....maybe

Nice looking work. How do you drive the broach?

It has a 1/2" diameter shank and fits in a 1/2" collet in the milling machine.

I simply align it to the stock and stroke it with the quill. I take about .010 each stroke for the first .060 of depth and about .005 thereafter.

Years ago I made keyway broaches for cutting keys in sprockets and pulleys etc the same way. So I figured that if I can cut steel that way, I sure can cut wood the same way

well done!

That's cool.

That's very cool.

vapo, you did well!

Very cool! Question - how do you glue the two pieces together? What adhesive do you use? Isn't this gluing end-grain to end-grain, how do you get the strength?

I was wondering the same thing, although a widows peak would go a long way toward helping with that, if of sufficient depth. I glue them on end grain to end grain, and after the epoxy sets I mill a deep slot that spans the walnut barrel channel and the ebony tip by a healthy amount and glue in a floating tenon.

I do like this design detail and the way Vapodog engineered it. Very cool indeed.

I thoroughly clean the ends to be glued with acetone to remove any natural oils in the wood.....and consider this to be extremely important. I then simply attach with devcon 2-ton epoxy. It has substantially greater strength than the 5-minute stuff and I've never had one come off. I did have a failure years ago when I didn't understand the importance of cleaning the natural oils from the joint.

[quote][ I mill a deep slot that spans the walnut barrel channel and the ebony tip by a healthy amount and glue in a floating tenon.
/quote]

This is a superb method and I suspect most "smiths" use it. I've re-attached completely broken forends the same way....Usually gluing in a piece of straight grained red oak....and for this I use Brownell's glass bedding.....the red (pourable) stuff....not the jell.

+1

Pretty ingenius. Nice work.