Fixing a badly cracked stock

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Was attending the Kit Carson rendezvous when a younger guy approached me and asked me about repairing his muzzleloader for him. He said he fell during a hunt and CRACK! The wrist blew out pretty seriously. He finished the hunt by using duct tape and even took a muley on the hunt. Its been almost 2 years and so I offered to take a look at it and after seeing it, saw it saw a nice clean split, no splintering or run off cracks. So I took it home and tonight, opened up the crack with a wedge and worked in a ton of high strength ( 150k psi ) epoxy and then clamped the stock together and wiped off the excess epoxy. I found that I can install a longer tang screw and suck the wood together from the top, and then I'll hit the bottom section of the stock with a hidden screw under the trigger. Once all the work is done, I'll rough up the stock a little bit and add some thicker layers of truoil around the cracks to help fill in any sharp edges that may be left over. Once that is taken care of, I'll buff the complete stock and apply a few hand rubbed coats of oil finish into the wood. I do have to remove some old bedding around the tang and open up the wood a little. Right now, you have to use a small hammer in order to install/remove the tang and that is just to damn tight. Also, when I install the bottom ( hidden ) screw, It will then be filled with epoxy and then screwed in for good.
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Nice job and nice rifle.
Well done, Jonathan. I'll copy and save this post in case I have a problem like that. Actually, I probably will just send out for repair.
Ron
 
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I have owned several working original rifles and shotguns with broken stocks that had good and bad repairs yet were still used for how ever long. Anything from hand forged nails to homemade screws and usually hide glue help to hold them together.
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African guns had the poorest repairs with lack of materials (they did what they could to make thwir firearms useable. I always was drawn to the North American Indian firearms, solid repairs and then wrapped with rawhide for the finishing touch.
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When it comes down to survial and all you have is what you got, use make do with it.




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I have seen nomadic herders in Mali, West Africa, with flintlock rifles (or smoothbores - I didn't get to see them close up) that were held together literally by baling wire.
They were hired by a gold mining company to walk around the cyanide, leaching ponds, firing on occasion to drive away birds attracted to the ponds.
 
I have seen nomadic herders in Mali, West Africa, with flintlock rifles (or smoothbores - I didn't get to see them close up) that were held together literally by baling wire.
They were hired by a gold mining company to walk around the cyanide, leaching ponds, firing on occasion to drive away birds attracted to the ponds.
I've seen some real nice 1800's rifles repaired with winding's of copper or steel, then wrapped with some type of leather. Looked really strong to. I saw the way Jon repaired that stock and that was a real surprise. You should have seen that gun when he brought it home....it looked like a throw away, it was in such bad shape.
 
Im very lucky, have a guy that grew up in furniture industry that can do marvelous things with wood...he worked in the repair division for about the last 15 years before retiring...had a brand new Browning rifle repaired by him and i could not locate the repair place by eye
 
I have done several bad broken/crack repairs and use a high grade marine epoxy. In most cases you cannot even tell there was a repair done and not one has failed. However this is not a rustic type of repair.
 
I've seen some real nice 1800's rifles repaired with winding's of copper or steel, then wrapped with some type of leather.
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Years ago I was at a training class in Chicago put on my AT&T. I was one of two from the US, there were 26 members in the class from around the world. Two engineers from Africa had some funny remarks about the new equipment being displayed.

At break I got to talk to one of them about what they used for phone equipment. Both worked for the group in power at that time (they were using radio for communications). I asked why, and was told telephone was to easy for others to listen in on government conversations. Plus they couldn't keep the phone lines up and working with the local natives stealing the copper to make different things they could sell to the tourists. Copper was the material of choice for most repairs like mentioned on broken stocks.


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