Not difficult. My people were boatbuilders and shipwrights when they weren't farming, and I grew up bending wood. The only hard part is reading the grain of figured wood so you don't crack the stock on 10 grand worth of Perazzi. Straight-grained stocks are pretty well…well…straightforward.



Build a serious, full-length jig with common heat lamps. The Big-Box stores carry the lamps cheap. This jig is two layers of ½” CDX sheathing laminated together using construction adhesive. Carved, contoured, carriage-bolted oak blocks at both muzzle and action padded by soft cedar shims make for zero slippage of the gun, which is required to protect the bluing. Just don’t bend the tubes by overtorquing those nuts. Trigger guards always come off for bending. With the guard off, double check to insure the wrist doesn’t have any repairs. Polyurethane and resorcinol glues are the only ones that’ll withstand heat. All the others will let go at well below 180 degrees F….including epoxy, PVA, casein, urea formaldehyde and hide glue.



To protect the finish, the wrist is wrapped tightly with several layers of cheesecloth and tied with string. Don’t leave any air pockets or the finish will bubble on you. A meat thermometer poked into one of the triggerguard screw holes measures temperature, a pocket watch keeps time, and a teakettle is used to heat peanut oil to just shy of boiling – around 200 degrees F. Peanut oil has a high flash point and doesn’t smoke, whereas linseed oil smokes and burns too easily.



The jig needs a brace to pull the stock into, and an index to measure how far. Fancy is a plastic grid. Simple is a couple of string lines riding in notches (which are easily moved with a dovetail saw and square when required) and a set of dividers and a rule.



Heat the wrist, keeping the cheesecloth soaked with hot peanut oil. After 20 full minutes at 180-190 degrees, try to bend the stock. Keep heating until it bends easily, some wrists are thicker than others and some wood denser than others. It’s the heat that plasticizes the wood’s cell walls, and it has to reach all the way to the core. For applying pressure, fancy is threaded rod inset into captured nuts let into the brace. Some even saw apart C-clamps to use the components. Simple are padded clamps. Note the C-clamp I’m using as an anchor has a scrap of leather glued to it as a pad. Be liberal with the peanut oil…keeping the varnish wet is the only think keeping it from bubbling. Also note there is a hole in the jig base to recover the oil using a pan beneath the bench.

(The reason I use a double layer of CDX for the base is for stiff…so I can cantilever the jig onto my workbench using clamps, so as to have the excess oil free-fall into a pan on the floor rather than run all over the bench top.)



When the core temperature of the wood is right, the walnut bends like a wet noodle. Don’t force anything…the wood will tell you when it’s ready. This one is getting a bit of comb and toe cast, but with this jig you can bend them in any direction required.



No need to worry about springback. Some do spring back a tad over time, some don’t. You can always put it back in the jig and bend it further in the direction you began, but undoing over-bends is more difficult and more risky.

Looking at the difference in the bend between photo's #4 and #6, while in the process of bending I release pressure on the clamps to see if it springs back, playing with it a bit until I have the bend I want. Then I remove the clamps immediately after getting the results desired…I don’t leave the stock in clamps until it cools. Fewer dents and surprises that way.



Refit the trigger guard, bending it with your hands if you have to. Don’t even think about bending a stock with it in place, or you may split out the inletting.

Have at it. Just avoid figured wood until you learn how to read wood grain and have a dozen or so bends under your belt.

Does this have applications to full-length, one-piece stocks like those found on rifles? Certainly….although it is rarely used.



Ideally, one-piece stocks are cut from tree crotches or bends so the wood grain runs parallel to the barrel channel then bends to run parallel with the comb. This minimizes grain runout at the stock’s toe (above), preventing weak short grain and the potential for cracking there. But figured wood rarely is found above the crotch in walnut and never in maple, so even the old masters generally ignored the problem and the stock often cracked with age and seasonal movement.

But by roughing out the blank then bending it at the wrist before completing the final shaping, you can have the best of all worlds – strength, stability, and figure too.

That is a really impressive technique. Thank you for putting this together.

Jeremy

I had this done to an old shotgun of mine by a former EJ CHurchill and Sons jobber.

Too bad you can't do it to a rifle.

Depending on the piece of wood on the rifle....yes you can!

Though not a gunsmith, I always check the Gunsmithing forum to see what I can learn. I am seldom disappointed and certainly not today. Very educational. One comment, you said the jig was made of 3/8 CDX. Looks like 3/4?

Thank you for taking the time to post all those great photos & the detailed explaination. A picture is worth a thousand words as they say.

Yes, very much apreciated. I always knew that hot oil was used but the method was never mentioned.

Von Gruff.

I watched Jack Rowe bend a stock in one of his week-long classes several years ago. He used linseed oil....the smoke and stink were quite memorable, and eye-burning.

quote:

Originally posted by Dennis Earl Smith:
Depending on the piece of wood on the rifle....yes you can!

shall I infer Dennis you mean a piece of wood with grain flowing through the wrist toward the buttstock? couldn't one also have a stock they like duplicated and left oversize to cast could be carved into the heel and toe?

do you have any pics of ones you've done? it would be great to see.

jeff

This is too cool for words, thank God for the pictures!

I have looked into this but have never seen it done, great photos. Now a question: I see that guitar and violin makers do a lot of bending and they use these little heating 'blankets' along with a temp controller to get the wood to just the right temp. This looks like it would give you better control, less chance to ruin the finish, etc. Have any stock benders tried this approach?
Also how do you handle a gun with a thru-bolt?
Thanks.
C.G.B.

quote:

Originally posted by cgbach:
...how do you handle a gun with a thru-bolt?

And the heating irons used in most music wood applications are for much thinner wood than a gunstock wrist. Nor is the wood already varnished.

Bending a rifle stock is the same process as other gunstocks...done with the action attatched and slowly and carefully. Yes, I have bent rifle stocks. I do not have a comuter that will allow me to post pictures at this time. Long story with bad results. I can type/read but picts disappear from the program as fast as I download them. Working on getting that fixed.

Incomplete answer....sorry. I usually leave wood all over the place when building a custom stock. It is easy to remove, but hard to put back on. Bending is always the last resort on a new gunstock. Most of the time the need arises because the wood moves after it is carved(internal stress can cause wood to move left/right or up/down). There is a need on some gunstocks to be moved due to carving errors caused by the multiple spindle duplicator in the intial manufacturing process. Learned this fact at Fajen. The farther from the pattern the more deflection error is transmitted into the cut gunstock. Right or left of the pattern makes a difference too.

A rifle stock may be bent if the wood structure will allow it...no matter which way the grain/wood pores lay. A major factor in weather or not to bend a rifle stock is what caliber is it. Larger the caliber...the stronger the piece of wood must be.

quote:

Originally posted by Dennis Earl Smith:
Incomplete answer....sorry. I usually leave wood all over the place when building a custom stock. It is easy to remove, but hard to put back on. Bending is always the last resort on a new gunstock.

Fine. But old master or not, the error in grain alignment below is gross...is commonly repeated today...and could have been easily avoided using a little heat....even in 1765.

I was shocked the school doesn't teach us anything about stock bending. I know a little bit about stock bending from reading, and know stock deminsions well enough, just dont know how to personally fit yet. Maybe one day an instructor will offer/incorporate a stock bending class...cough cough.

Aaron, please call me at 541-483-2182. I believe it will be worth your time. Thanks.

More short grain. Look at the grain runout in the wrist below. It's no wonder so many old guns have repaired cracks.

Will y'all's stocks perform any better over time?



Choosing stump wood or a blank with vertical grain on its face won't help, either. The wood's rays run 90 degrees to the growth rings and are also natural fracture lines. Bandsawing a stock profile out of the fancy stockblank below will only repeat the gross errors in grain alignment depicted in my two examples above.



The best solution is to avoid short grain entirely. Normally this is done by milling blanks from crotches or natural bends. I'm only pointing out that it can also be done by bending....and easily done, too. It doesn't even have to come out perfect....almost anything is an improvement over the wrist above.

Fortunately not everyone ignores the problem when shaping a blank. Below is one where the grain in the wrist aligns nicely with the stress that will be placed on it in service. The blank was probably milled from a tree crotch.