I've just returned from the Shamanic Secret Underground Reloading and Gunsmithing Facility.

Back in January, I bought a Boyd's AT-One stock for my Ruger American Predator in 223 REM. It came with a ProBed 2000 bedding kit. I was having trouble getting and aftermarket single-shot magazine replacement to fit right, so I put it on the shelf for later. Later came this AM. Just for [bleep], I tried fitting the aftermarket magazine in and got it working properly, so now I had no excuse not to bed.

I've never bedded before. I've read about it plenty of times, but I just never had a need. With the AT-One stock, there's really no getting around it. It's part of the fitting process. Here it is, a couple hours into the cure, and I'm still not convinced I haven't just glued a rifle into its stock. I guess I'll know tomorrow.

I used the Dremel to hog out a bit of stock in front of the front screw-- about 2 inches of barrel. I also opened up the area around the back of the tang. There are two blocks that come with the stock that fit fore and aft of the RAR's magazine. These have to be cemented into place. That's the reason for the inclusion of the bedding kit. There are pre-designed gaps in the stock to take the epoxy.

The kit comes with a bag of release agent. I went over everything I could anticipate with it, and then took some old Johnson's paste wax and goobered up all the screws and threads and nooks and crannies. I wrapped a couple wraps of electrical tape around the barrel to make sure there was ample free-floating, and then set to mixing the 2-parts of compound and fixer. I used an old butter knife to spread the epoxy around. I screws everything together and backed the screws out and used some more paste wax just to be sure.

Really and truly, it went off just like everyone says it would. I've promised myself not to go downstairs again until its cured.

Question: How do you deal with the nagging feeling that you've just done something horribly wrong? Ruined the rifle? Made a rift in the space time continuum that only tearing the rifle out of the stock will fix? I've tried prayer. I've tried mowing the lawn. I tried to think of baseball, seeing how that works for nearly everything else. There's no baseball on.

I have that feeling every time I bed a rifle and so far it has been wrong. Nothing you can do now but wait and see. It might be hard to pop out, don't freak out if it doesn't just lift right out. Good luck!

What redleg said is bang on. I've bedded probably close to a dozen stocks, still get the jitters about using enough release agent / release agent in the right areas. Never had an issue.

I have only done two, but as long as you filled undercuts that could lock things, and paste waxed everything, you should be okay

Struggling with patience my whole life, I keep the leftover as a sample. When the sample gets veryfirm but still a little rubbery - you can cut it with a knife - I'll pop the action off. At worst you;ll have to clean up and start over. If it cures and sticks you might need a little heat to free it up.

Or the alternative...

Have been epoxy-bedding stocks since the mid-1970s, probably a dozen a year--which adds up to at least 300. "Stuck" one, around 30 years ago, that probably would have come loose after putting it in a chest freezer overnight.

The "sticky" ones (those that wouldn't come apart just by pulling the stock off) all came apart with two methods, sometimes combined:

1) Putting the forend in a bench vise (inside a piece of thick leater), then placing my forearm under the barrel, my hand on the table, and using my forearm as a lever to "lift" the barrel.

2) If that didn't work, turning the front action screw in around 3 turns, so the screw-head was well above the stock. Then placed the rifle upside-down in a bench vise, and whacked the head of the screw with a chunk of hardwood. (This also works well with "stockmaker's" screws, longer screws without heads, for aligning the action while inletting.)

As I recall, I learned these from a couple of Roy Dunlap's books, including the one co-written by Jim Carmichel.

Thanks all!

I got up early this AM, and went to check out the rifle. The glob of epoxy I'd left out was hard and crisp. I tried inserting the bolt and then using it as a pry bar like the directions suggested. Then I realized I needed to remove the action screws first ( Hey, it's my first job!)

Once the screws were out, I lifted the barrel, pressing down on the end of the stock with my thumb and. . .

. . . Popped right out! There was only a wee dab of epoxy back by the safety that needed to be cut out. The rest had gone where needed and not stayed out of the places it shouldn't.


Question: How soon should can I actually fire the rifle? I'm going to the farm today. Conceivably, I could have it pointed at a target by this afternoon. Is that Kosher?

Good news if you glue one, drop it in the freezer for a while and then give it a not-too-hard whack.

Yes.

Check the directions on the Pro-Bed kit, they should have a recommended cure time, I usually give at least 48 hours after a bedding job before firing the rifle. Just me likely but I want to be sure that the epoxy has had time to thoroughly cure.

drover

Cure time for most hard epoxies is around 24 hours.

Just an FYI - Most room temperature epoxy systems, including all that I'm aware of that are used for bedding rifles, will reach about 85-90% of full cure in 24 hours at normal room temperature (72F). However, to reach full cure or as fully cured as most of them can get, takes about 7 days at room temperature. The obvious question is "Is 85-90% of full cure sufficient?" I would answer that, yes, in most cases it is more than sufficient as I'm sure most of you know through experience. If it was a big bore rifle, I might wait a few more days before shooting.

By the way, I know this because I work in the composite materials industry and our company develops high end resin systems for all kinds of applications.

This thread is worthless without pics of the final job!

What you got Shaman? Did you do some sort of incantation while the epoxy was setting up to ensure a release?

You're right! Pics are needed.

I've got the rifle down at the farm now. I'll try and post some glamor pics here in a day or so.

The nitty gritty pics of the bedding job will have to wait.

Here's a pic of the finished product:




Pics and Article are here:

Ruger American Predator Redux

Consider 85% of your epoxy product compressive strength and the compressive strength of a good piece of walnut. Where does that put you. We know walnut works.

. . . and in this case, it's a 223 REM so there are not going to be any real stresses.

Well, I finally had a look at the results from yesterday's shooting. When I started out it was dead calm, but by the time I had the targets up and the rifle out on the bench, I was already starting to get some wind. I'm not much good at judging wind. . . not yet.

I had to tweak the scope a bit, but after 10 shots, I did get one 3 shot group of under an inch and two of the three were touching. My next shot on the fresh target nailed the bull, and then the wind started to really blow, and so I gave up. There's promise there.

I then spent an hour out mowing the rough stuff and that included mowing around the 100 and new 200 yard target frames. When it looked like it was going to rain, I came in and just for [bleep], I tried hitting the 14" plate at 200 yards. Yep! it works.

I'm certainly no expert on walnut, but wood is a naturally occurring composite material, so has different material properties in different directions. Just a quick search on Matweb shows that Black Walnut has a compressive strength of 1020 psi perpendicular to the grain and about 7570 psi parallel to the grain. A generic, two-part epoxy resin system, no fillers or fibers mixed in, is a homogeneous material, meaning it has the same properties in all directions, just like a metal. Marine-Tex for example, is an epoxy resin system that is often used for bedding rifles. It has a compressive strength that ranges from 8700 psi (white) to 13000 psi (grey). So, if we take 85% of that, we get 7395 psi to 11050 psi, both of which are just about equal to or greater than the strongest of walnut.

A word of caution is that all epoxy systems do not have the same properties, as evidenced just with the two variations of Marine-Tex that you can readily buy. Your standard 5 minute cure epoxy will not have the same strength as your 1-4 hour cure epoxies. Epoxy systems that have an elevated temperature cure will typically achieve even higher strengths, but most people don't want to deal with the headache of curing your stock in an oven, let alone determining if that elevated temperature will damage your stock.

The other thing to point out is that a filled resin system, meaning a resin that is reinforced with particulate, like alumina or silica particles, can greatly increase the compression strength of an epoxy system. The particulate will usually increase the viscosity of the resin system as well, making it easier to handle and apply to your stock, rather than the original Acraglas system which was really low viscosity and difficult to use. You can also buy metallic particles that can be mixed into epoxy systems that will add even more strength, and maybe more importantly, stiffness (elastic modulus). Brownells sells these metallic particles for just such applications.

Hope that helps.

For this sort of thing we're shooting from the hip to get an idea of how things lay. For that I generally use JB Weld as a baseline. It's reasonably good stuff and the stuff formulated for bedding is at least as good. JB Weld claims 3960 psi in compression. Datasheet Now compared to 1020 for walnut even common filled epoxy is so much stronger that I'm not going to worry about it. Also note that tensile, compressive and shear strength correlate,

(I had only meant to suggest a methodology for analysis.)

Glad it was of some help. Keep in mind that the 1020 psi is in the soft direction of the wood, so in most cases in a rifle, the recoil lug is acting on the wood in the parallel to the grain direction, or the strong direction, so we're probably closer to the 7500 psi strength. The 3960 psi for JB Weld illustrates how different epoxy systems have different strengths (as compared to Marine-Tex). In any case, from your experience, the 3960 is plenty of strength to get the job done. Bottom line for me, though, is that you definitely want to wait at least 24 hours for the epoxy to cure before you actually use the rifle. And, you want to make sure that you're curing at around 72F. If you're curing at say, 62-65F, then you might want to wait a bit longer.

As I wrote somewhere else the reaction rate - cure here - is governed by the Arrhenius equation which is exponential with temperature. So a little warmer makes a significant difference in cure time. In fact a common ploy in amateur composite aircraft construction is to let the composite bake in the heat of the sun to insure a cure to ultimate strength as that's really important to the pilot.

You're right about compressive strength, don't know how I did that. But I did find maximum strength for ideal English walnut of 7,280 psi. The other figure is for black walnut. But it doesn't really matter here. And in the real world it's at least 24 hrs. before I can get to the range anyway. While I use JB Weld in the garage bedding is done with Acraglas Gel. Mainly because it works and I don't think it has any tricks left to play on me.

Yay, Congratulations on having it go right! Yaaaaaaay.

I usually pop the action before complete cure, do any shaping and blort removal necessary while things are still softish. It's just easier than with fully-cured goop, and if you did it right, it's not an issue in terms of affecting the fit long term.

But I usually wait at least double the full-set time, 48 hours is a good benchmark, before shooting. In fact, I like to leave everything apart once it's been popped the first time for at least 24 hours, then check fit, then take it apart again to let it "breathe" or whatever. Doubt it's really needed, but I feel better.

Congrats on successful completion of your first bedding job, Shaman! Based on your description of what you did, it sounds like you got all bases covered in doing a "proper" stress-free job. I've not bedded close to the number of rifles MD has, but I've probably bedded close to 100 rifles between mine and friends and family member's rifles. I experienced that same anxiety on at least the first dozen rifles. Miraculously, I've never had a problem removing the barreled action from the stock, though a couple of them sure had me worried for a bit before the action finally popped loose! I believe as long as you fill in or otherwise avoid areas where voids or reverse angles occur that can create a mechanical lock and ensure that you used release agent on all surfaces contacting epoxy, you're good to go. I've tried a lot of different epoxies and a lot of different release agents. My current "go to" bedding epoxies are Score High's Pro Bed 2000 and Brownells Steel Bed. I've settled on Brownells Acra-Release aerosol spray for release agent, as it's just so fast and easy to apply a thin layer of release agent to metal while being very thorough, and a 14 oz can of the stuff will last for at least a dozen rifles. I remove the excess bedding squeezed into the magazine and trigger inlet spaces and anywhere else it doesn't belong with a combination of small abrasive drums and cutters in a Dremel, which gives me precise control and a clean edge.

Wishing you many more successful bedding jobs sir!

Congrats on your bedding job.How do you like that stock?I want to get one for my Tikka T1x 17HMR.Thanks,Huntz

I have never had one stuck though insufficient release agent but have broken a stock during the separation which is a method of slamming the barrel on a wooden block. The Weatherby Mark V stock was send off to a stock maker who glued and pinned the stock as it actually split along the grain which paralleled my point of impact.

I don't keep records any more but one year bedded something over 50 stocks so it it up in the 3 figures somewhere. I was taught my Mike378 from here and his experience would be somewhere between high and staggering.

The main advantage of learning to bed your own stocks is that if you don't like it, think you can do better, neater or whatever, you can simply dremel it out and repeat. It is another aspect to the hobby which can be very satisfying to watch your loads become more uniform and reliable.

The AT-One is the absolute shizz. The fit was spot on. My only problem is that I'm still getting used to the palm swell. It's replaceable, but I could also probably fashion my own if I really wanted. We'll see. I may grow to love it. Both the palm swell and the forend have other options. They are expensive, but they exist.

As a first time buyer of Boyd's, The initial ordering process was easy and straight-forward. I've got a bit of a beef in that they lost the initial order and contacted me after two months to re-confirm. That made for a bit of hassle. Their customer service seemed a bit over-wrought at the time. I think they just got backed up after Christmas. Once the second order was in, the stock was delivered right away.

None of this would dissuade me from ordering again.

That's a nice combo, I can see why you were a bit nervous. I started on clunkers, trying to bring them back from the dead.