Nice stocks! Beautiful wood.Another one (bottom one) from the coffee table. Laminated with maple.
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It really knocked your eyes out with a finish on it!
Way better than show me your chassis and have a Tupperware party.Thanks, Josh! Didn't mean to monopolize the thread, but I'm pretty passionate about stocks and wood and got carried away!
Steve
Kind of odd but I saw one made of persimmon that was cut down locally. It was actually really nice looking, took color, and was fairly dense. Guy finished it in a clear coat high gloss finish.
I don't know where or if you could find that commercially though
Be careful what you ask for, Dusty!I want a remington classic copy made from osage orange (bois d’arc) and a 40x copy made from cocobolo
Be careful what you ask for, Dusty!Remember, I said we've built stocks out of about everything.
We'd often get a story about how some special tree grew in Uncle Fudd's backyard, and this guy wants a stock out of it! OK, send us a chunk of it.......it's Osage Orange. In Kansas we just call it "hedge" because most all fence posts are made of it. It gets harder with age and will outlast all of us. Walnut is about 35 pounds per cubic foot, so I bet hedge must be 45! It's about all I burn in the fireplace; it's MUCH hotter than any other wood around here!
Back to the story......hedge wood always splits/cracks. I suppose if you treated it with polyethylene glycol, it would stabilize, but I'm not gonna mess with that! We sawed it into four pieces horizontally and glued it back together (I always used urea resin glue; doesn't leech out later like aliphatic resin [white w/additives =yellow] glues do). Then we whittled out our prone pattern with it. I told the guy if he lost a match and threw it on the ground or drove his F150 over it, it would still be OK!
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Hey Steve! Pull out your nicest blank and put my name on it! I’d like to do a nice one for myself. Maybe two! Heck, maybe three.Hey Dusty and everyone else! I appreciate your offer of a project, but we officially retired from building stocks about a year ago. We did it for 25 years and sold over 1000 stocks all over the world. I invented the thumbwheel cheek adjuster even before that, installed hundreds and sold thousands to gunsmiths and individuals. I've had my nose "overhauled" 3 times - that's enough! Be sure you all wear dust masks, especially working with the Rutland/Boyd type laminates!
Now the good news - a friend of ours, and good shooter, Darrel Landolt, has taken over the business. He got all of our Rutland laminates (there are no more of them; the place burned down!), walnut blanks, and most of our patterns. He is using our cheek adjuster, butt assembly, and forend rail hardware.
http://mcgeestocks.com/hardware.html
He was an accomplished, meticulous woodworker before this, so his stocks are as good as ours! His e-mail address is dklandolt@att.net, and his home phone is (618) 654 1589 and cell is (618) 581 7188. He has morphed our website into his:
http://www.landoltstocks.com/index.html
BTW, we have about 100 mostly Claro walnut blanks to liquidate, from plain to fancy - $100 to $350. I'm trying to catalogue them now; let us know if you're interested.
Steve
Didn’t know about dogwoodWhen I worked an Arborist I worked with some guys that were all over Persimmon and also Dogwood. They aren't very big trees and not cut down very often so any time one had to come down the wood was a prized possession. As I recall, one of the guys was making tool handles and other small things like that out of the Dogwood.
Hey Steve! Pull out your nicest blank and put my name on it! I’d like to do a nice one for myself. Maybe two! Heck, maybe three.Got pics?