What, if any approach should I take toward fixing it....?

For details, this is a 30-06 FWT that has the somewhat ubiquitous grack in the "web" between the magazine and trigger cut-outs. It is a hairline crack right down the center of the web and appears to go all the way thru as when I pull on the sides of the stock I can see some motion. It also appears that the center action screw did not have enough clearance here as you can see a well defined impression where it has been contacting the "web". My guess is that this contributed to the cracking to some extent.

So, I plan to refinish the stock, which actually has nice grain to it, but has been cut and partially refinished at one time. I think it will refinish well. My plan is to "restify" the stock to make it a durable and consistent hunter. I am going to pillar bed it, add a red decelerator and free float the bbl, and re-cut the checkering, so I am not overly concerned with stock mods, but want it to look mostly original.

My thought is to dremel the crack to open it up to around 1/16 in, then get some epoxy in there and let it set. I figured I would do this in two steps, going halfway thru the thickness of the web each time (once from the top and opnce from the bottom) so that I could clamp the stock while it cured. Then I thought I might cross-bolt it.

I've never done that, but read about drilling thru and putting in threaded rod, then counterboring and epoxying in some ebony plugs.

So, does this sound like a reasonable plan? Is it overkill?

Has anyone ever cross bolted an OEM p-64 stock in this area? If so, what size threaded rod would be good, I am thinking maybe 1/4 inch? Lastly, can one buy ebony dowels for this work or do you need to turn your own?

Thanks for reading and any thoughts/input.

Regards,

Bob

My transition model 270 was split there and also at the recoil lug recess. I put crossbolts at both locations and fully glassed the stock. No more problems and shoots great. Also thinned the stock to more pleasing proportions. i used the cross bolts that Brownells sells that have the two hole for a spanner. I think the bolt is 1/4". I use them on everything. If I don't use these I use 1/4" all thread rod and put ebony 3/8" caps to cover. Coat the allthread with acraglas gel and insert.

quote:

dremel the crack to open it up to around 1/16 in

A coping saw or hack saw might be a bit more exact for that job.

Blackbart

You dont want to open the crack up with a dremel tool.

Get a piece of hardwood and cut it on a taper so it will start in the magazine box opening, gently tap the tapered wood to open the crack up to about 1/8 inch. Put some acetone in a little squeeze bottle and thorougly wash out the crack to remove all oil. Blow out with compressed air. Mix up some Brownells acraglass and draw it into a syringe. Use the syringe to pump acraglass into the crack. You can also move the tapered wood in and out to open and close the crack, gently now. This will draw the glass all the way into the crack. Now you can wrap the stock with surgical tubing to pull the crack completely together and wipe off the excess.

Cross bolts are usually 1/4 inch diameter. How ever I think that would be too big for the location of your crack. You can reinforce the area internally by making a groove spanning across the crack, then a hole at each end allowing you to drop in a piece of metal in the shape of a staple with more acraglass poured over it.

Another internal repair that is extremely strong is to coat the front of the cracked area with glass, then lay a thin piece of fiberglass cloth against it and saturate the cloth with glass bedding epoxy. It will never seperate at that location again. When I glass bed magnum rifles I install glass cloth at that location as part of the job.

Look at the inside of a Remington 1100 shotgun fore end. It is very thin but has a layer of fiberglass cloth epoxied to the inside and they never crack now.

What Craftsman said...I would spread it and glue it with glass, then glass bed the rifle from one end to the other and not let the glass show.

The other alternative is to get a new old pre 64 stock, lots of them around..I don't think I have a Fwt stock, just some std. wt. stocks with recoil pads..

I have a featherweight stock.
It has a pad, and some idiot did a real neat job of stamping his name in the bottom of the pistol grip.
It would not be hard to sand out and there are no cracks. if you are intrested I,d probably sell it for 50.00 or trade it for somthing I might need, all us rifle loonies have odds and ends floating around we don't need,
Probably aught to make a list, mabye get rid of some junk and make some one happy and a buck or 2 at the same time...tj3006

quote:

Originally posted by zimbabwe:
My transition model 270 was split there and also at the recoil lug recess. I put crossbolts at both locations and fully glassed the stock. No more problems and shoots great. Also thinned the stock to more pleasing proportions. i used the cross bolts that Brownells sells that have the two hole for a spanner. I think the bolt is 1/4". I use them on everything. If I don't use these I use 1/4" all thread rod and put ebony 3/8" caps to cover. Coat the allthread with acraglas gel and insert.

That's the only sure fix.

I wouldn't fool around with trying to squirt epoxy in the crack and have it hold, cause it will just split again from recoil.

Don

WHen repairing cracks such as your, I usually cut a trough on the top and bottom of the crack, Spread it open, Get regular acraglas with no floc to flow on all wood surfaces of the cracklet the wood pop back together, put glas in the troughs, and wrap surgical tubing around the stock at that point. You will likely need to go back in and fill up the troughs a second time, and if so I use acraglas gel or marine tex. No tubing needed at this point.

I recently got soem West Systems epoxy based on thins I read on this board. I am going to use it for the sealer coat when finishing new stocks and see how I like it. So far I have only used it to epoxy broken things in the shop and in the house. If I were to get a cracked stock in today, I would use th eWest System in the crack instead of the original acraglas. It is very runny and would get into the crack with ease.

Oh yeah, and here is a PM I recently sent to someone telling them how I do recoil bolts and ebony plugs:

PM#1

here is how I make ebony plugs to fit over recoil bolts. I am not saying it is the best way, or even a good way, but it works for me.

I made a cutter with a pilot the dimension of the recoil bolt body diameter and the cutting portion the diameter of the ehad of the recoil bolt. I made a center for my mill drill chuck and one for my mill vise. I line these up where they are perfectly tip to tip.

I measure the stock and figure out where I want the bolts to go and mark each side with a punch. I line up the stock where the drill is over one punch mark and the other is resting over the mill vise center. I drill about 65% through that side. I wthen flip it over and drill through the punch mark in th estock until the hols connect.

Next i put the stock on a bench vise and drill each side with my big cutter. I drill it where the head will be burried pretty deep. I then tighten the begeesus out of the bolt. This leaves them a good bit below the surface of the wood.

I then take a piece of ebony and band saw off a piece that is roughly square and about 6" long. Next I take it to my belt grinder and with a 36 grit belt work it over until it is pretty round.

Then I go to my lathe amd chuck it up in my 6 jaw and stick a live center in the tail end. I grind a form tool to a very sharp point with a lot of positive rake and tons of back clearance. I run my autofeed down pretty slow and make light passes until I get it where I want it. When it is to about the right size I finish it with shop rolls held on the rotating wood. When it id nice and smooth, I burnish the wood by picking up some of the ebony saw dust and closing my hand around the rotating wood. I close my fist so the sawdust is tight against the wood. It gets hot and I just hold as tight as I can. Do this several times until it is like you want it.

next I take the round piece of wood to the band saw and cut off little plugs. I install them with regular acraglass. Be sure to orient the grrain in the ebony so it runs north-south on the rifle


PM #2

I put some ebony plugs in this morning and thought of a couple of things I did not tell you. I make sure the plugs are just a skosh bigger than the holes. I am talking about .002" or so. I also mix in a little fine ebony sawdust into the epoxy I use to hold the plugs. Any epoxy or ebony laden epoxy will show as a shiny ring when finished off.

A tip I got from a well known stockmaker who is also a frined of mine is to lightly rub the shiny spot with a regular pencil eraser. Do not rub to hard. Just lightly it the shiny spot until it blends with the rest of the finish. If you go too far, just rub finish on the spot and try again after it dries. He said they also do this when repairing flaws in wood, such as filling a small void in burl.

Also, I use either C clamps or a vise and squeeze the plugs towards the center of the stock after I insert them. Be careful fitting, and have them a very tight fit to reduce the chances of the bright epoxy ring mentioend baove showing. Anyway, use the force of the clamp or vise carefully. I ahve never split the wood this way, BUT I have split a lot of other things in th epast when performing similar operations. With the liquid epoxy and tight fitting plugs, combined with a sligth taper to the hole and/or plug, you can generate A LOT of pressure inside the hole. Plenty enough pressure to split the wood.

I let the plugs set up under pressure. Today I wrapped surgical tubing very, very tightly over the plugs and will leave it like that until tomorrow.

BTW-I used West System epoxy today. I just bought it a couple of months ago and this is only the second time I have used it (first time was to repair a kitchen stool last week). I used 105 Resin and 207 Hardner, based on reccomendadtions from this site. It is supposed to be the cat's meow for sealer coats on wood stocks. I am going to use it in lieu of acraglas when I finish the stock I am working on right now.

Regarding how I put bolts in, if you search this section you will find where I posted my method several times. I use the BSquare from Brownells, but there is nothing magic about them. Talleys are the same size and would work as well. Or you could make some. But for what little they cost, it does not make sense for me to make recoil bolts.

Just putting all thread in will help, but it you can tighten the the boltd that have heads larger than the bodies, then technically they are better, as the wood is under compression.

That being said, I have installed internal recoil bolts since 1985 which can not put the wood under compression, and none of those have failed. So you be the judge and do it the way you feel most comfortable with.

quote:

Originally posted by Marc_Stokeld:


I recently got soem West Systems epoxy based on thins I read on this board. I am going to use it for the sealer coat when finishing new stocks and see how I like it. So far I have only used it to epoxy broken things in the shop and in the house. If I were to get a cracked stock in today, I would use th eWest System in the crack instead of the original acraglas. It is very runny and would get into the crack with ease.

The West will work better than acraglass which is nothing more than thickened epoxy. It doesn't flow well into small spaces and doesn't penetrate the wood well. Also, don't thin the epoxy. It weakens it. Using good epoxy like west, heat it to @ 150 deg F. It becomes water thin and will run into all the small recesses of the crack if it's opened slightly. You can also gently heat the area with a heat gun to keep the epoxy from thickening back up as the stock cools it down. The crack area will be stronger than it ever was. I've done many of them over the years and they never broke in that crack again.
I had one 3 years ago, that was a Weatherby MkV 270W that an idiot, the owner loaned it to, had put 270 win ammo in. The owner brought it in with tears in his eys, and the stock in 5 pieces. You can hardly find the cracks & the gun is still holding up well.
BTW: if you want the same thing as acraglass at a much cheaper price, buy superbond epoxy adhesive from Fiberglass coatings inc. http://www.fgci.com/

I have heated epoxy in non-load bearing applications, but generally won't do it where any amount of strength is required. Due to the extra heat, the epoxy cross-linking greatly increases. This makes its ultimate tensile strength rise, but is ductility and flexability drop off the charts. It gets very brittle and loses almost all of its toughness, so I don't do it.

The West Systems models I mention above are already water thin. They were designed for applications where rotten wood on boats needed to be strengthened. They were designed to be incredibly thin an dhave penetration better than anything I have used, including regular acraglas that has been greatly heated.

The epoxy will work, it is not "fooling around". It will create a bond that is stronger than the original wood. You need to remove any oils that may have migrated in there as already mentioned.

Once done, make sure that the magazine box is not bearing at the rear.

quote:

Originally posted by Customstox:
The epoxy will work, it is not "fooling around". It will create a bond that is stronger than the original wood. You need to remove any oils that may have migrated in there as already mentioned.

Once done, make sure that the magazine box is not bearing at the rear.

You're more experienced in stock repairs than I am.
I had my first custom rifle made in 1957, a 7mm Ackley Magnum with a full stock. Several years later, the stock cracked in the web area we are discussing. I sent it back to the stockmaker and he did an epoxy fix. That fix didn't hold and it cracked again. The second time I returned it, he installed a cross bolt, which did hold.

Don

quote:

Originally posted by Marc_Stokeld:
I have heated epoxy in non-load bearing applications, but generally won't do it where any amount of strength is required. Due to the extra heat, the epoxy cross-linking greatly increases. This makes its ultimate tensile strength rise, but is ductility and flexability drop off the charts. It gets very brittle and loses almost all of its toughness, so I don't do it.

The West Systems models I mention above are already water thin. They were designed for applications where rotten wood on boats needed to be strengthened. They were designed to be incredibly thin an dhave penetration better than anything I have used, including regular acraglas that has been greatly heated.

I would have to disagree, having done a lot of research on it as a classic boat fanatic & a gunsmith. Heating epoxy to that temp, does not affect the strength (tensile, sheer etc) in any way. Howver, the epoxy you are talking about is thinned (penetrating) epoxy which is very weak. In fact, it's mostly used to arrest rot in wood. I've used it to prepare wood that has had oil in it for a true epoxy repair. Because of the solvents it can help to remove & flash off oils etc.

This is from the West System manual:
"There are epoxy-based products specifically designed to penetrate and reinforce rotted wood. These products, basically an epoxy thinned with solvents, do a good job of penetrating wood. But the solvents compromise the strength and moisture barrier properties of the epoxy. WEST SYSTEM epoxy can be thinned with solvents for greater penetration, but not without the same compromises in strength and moisture resistance. Acetone, toluene or MEK have been used to thin WEST SYSTEM epoxy and duplicate these penetrating epoxies with about the same effectiveness. If you chose to thin the epoxy, keep in mind that the strength and moisture protection of the epoxy are lost in proportion to the amount of solvent added.

There is a better solution to get good penetration without losing strength or moisture resistance. We recommend moderate heating of the repair area and the epoxy with a heat gun or heat lamp. The epoxy will have a lower viscosity and penetrate more deeply when it is warmed and contacts the warmed wood cavities and pores. Although the working life of the epoxy will be considerable shortened, slower hardeners (206, 207, 209) will have a longer working life and should penetrate more than 205 Hardener before they begin to gel. When the epoxy cures it will retain all of its strength and effectiveness as a moisture barrier, which we feel more than offsets any advantages gained by adding solvents to the epoxy."

I agree with Customstocks, if its glassed properly it will hold, but if the inletting is sloppy then the whole gun may need glasing...

My guess is when they split its because the inletting was bad to start with or the wood had shrunk, or the wood had poor layout, or maybe the caliber was a big bore. I have seen some 100 year old guns that have been shot to death and they were not split because they used good cured wood, properly inletted and properly laid out for grain flow, some of them were big bores btw....

I based my statements based on my graduate school education in mechanical engineering where I learned, studied, supervised, worked, and gave presentations to groups of international researchers on the long term properties of of plastics and composites.

If you have discovered a system where additionally cross linking does not occur and the matrix ductility is increased by applying additional heat during the cure, I would really like to hear about it. It has been 8 years since grad school, and maybe something has changed since then and I did not hear about it in my readings and work. I always love to hear about a better mouse trap!!!

WHat West says is correct. Of course you can heat it and make it penetrate better. But if you notice they do not claim that the ductility of the matrix is not degraded. The discussion in this thread is about repairing a gun stock, which takes quite an impact load and flexes the wood fibers through the section of the stock in question. A matrix with a lower ductility is more likely to fail than a matrix with a higer ductility. They are building epoxy with the intention of improving boat repair. WHat is best for boat repair is not neccessarily best for firearm applications. Do you see how what can be 100% true for a boat application is not necessarily true for other applications?

If anyone knows anyone at West or in mechanical engineering faculty at a university, i would love to see them do a test on it. It would be great if ductility was not sacrificed for greater penetration. Maybe they have some super duper formula that does it. But if they do, it is not written in any place that I have seen on their web site.

BTW-they mention that pot life is shorter for the "super-penetrating" hardner. I found the pot life to be 2-3 times as long as acraglas. I forget how long it was before it really started getting firm, but it was close to 40 minutes after it was mixed.

quote:

Originally posted by Atkinson:
My guess is when they split its because the inletting was bad to start with or the wood had shrunk, or the wood had poor layout, or maybe the caliber was a big bore.

Ray,
I suspect that's what happened with my rifle.
It wasn't inletted right to begin with.

Don

quote:

Originally posted by Marc_Stokeld:

WHat West says is correct. Of course you can heat it and make it penetrate better. But if you notice they do not claim that the ductility of the matrix is not degraded. The discussion in this thread is about repairing a gun stock, which takes quite an impact load and flexes the wood fibers through the section of the stock in question. A matrix with a lower ductility is more likely to fail than a matrix with a higer ductility. They are building epoxy with the intention of improving boat repair. WHat is best for boat repair is not neccessarily best for firearm applications. Do you see how what can be 100% true for a boat application is not necessarily true for other applications?

What they say is that it retains "ALL" its strength. Contrary to the penetrating epoxy which is very weak. BTW, a wood boat takes far more flexibility & pounding than a gunstock. Ductility isn't as important in a close joint even if heating it did reduce flexibility. I've never seen it fail in the (stock) crack, after having used it about since West System came out in the 70's. That's good enough for me. As for mechanical engineers, I used to lecture them on chemistry (industrial water treatment, ASHRAE etc.) I'm sure we can sit here & try to obfuscate the issue with convoluted language to bore the readers of this thread, but the fact is, heated epoxy works in gunstock repair & penetrating (thinned) epoxy does not. The engineers I've talked to (epoxy & polymer specialists) at West, tell me the (cured) structure is not changed at all, as long as it's not overheated. Some epoxy gets way hotter than that curing in the pot as it starts to "kick"
I'd go with the recommendations of West way before anyone's. Esp a mech engr.

Sounds good to me!

Have you used the West in actual gun finishes? If so, how was it? How exactly did you apply it? Has anyone tried sanding in the first 2 sealer coats? The stuff was so thin I think you could do it. I am probably going to give it a shot anyway.

I have used acraglas for the first 2 sealer coats on most gunstocks for years, and now want to use West. From the kitchen stool I fied with it, she sure does seem to seep into pores well. Some folks here seem to really like West for that application, and as said above, I love looking for a better mouse trap.

You gave me some good info here and I thank you sir!

Marc,
I just went and checked my West systems epoxy (105 resin) and it is anything but water thin. In fact it is very close in viscosity to Acraglass (not the gel) that comes as a resin with floc to add some body.

quote:

Originally posted by Marc_Stokeld:
Sounds good to me!

Have you used the West in actual gun finishes? If so, how was it? How exactly did you apply it? Has anyone tried sanding in the first 2 sealer coats? The stuff was so thin I think you could do it. I am probably going to give it a shot anyway.

I have used acraglas for the first 2 sealer coats on most gunstocks for years, and now want to use West. From the kitchen stool I fied with it, she sure does seem to seep into pores well. Some folks here seem to really like West for that application, and as said above, I love looking for a better mouse trap.

You gave me some good info here and I thank you sir!

I have used epoxy as a filler, awhile back. Always sanded it flush with the surface & put a good urethane finish over it. Epoxy has no UV resistance & oxidizes when exposed. I quit using it as it didn't level out as well as many other products & was harder to sand out. The outer finish is what determines the durabiliy of the stock finish, and it just didn't seem worthwhile to have a much harder sealer than the final finish. I've used epoxy on wood boats but only to "wet out" glass cloth or as a moisture seal. It's more moisture resistant than PU finishes. It may stabilize a stock slightly better against moisture absorption, but I think a good epoxy bedding job would do it as well in the critical areas.

I had a pre-64 Model 70 Super Grade 375 H&H (1949) that was cracked as you describe. I glass-bedded it from 2" in front of the receiver to the tang with Accraglass. Never had a problem after that. It then shot better than I could consistently hold it.