Is your rifle a Hopkins and Allen? Interesting choice of wood for a stock.

jhm wrote on Sep 29^th, 2024 at 12:23pm:


I've done it before, bet I can do it again!  Now just to find the time and ambition.  But, I won't do it until I've tig welded up the lever, and fit a barrel to the rifle.  No sense in stocking a rifle until you know it's worth the effort.   

This is an interesting homemade rifle I've had for many years.  The lever finger casting is riveted onto the original lever with nails, and the barrel was hand filed offset to make the rim hit the firing pin correctly; the original was probably .32 so it doesn't hit .22 right otherwise.  Only reason I've kept it is that the stock fits me amazingly well and I want to duplicate it in something that actually fits the action and doesn't have a bunch of epoxy putty.    The offset firing pin is easy to fix on an H&A; just change the link length.  Not sure why the original "gunsmith" didn't just do that!

Westerner, mostly that's camera perspective.  It's tight, maybe 1/4" short, and I can adapt to that by changing the cheek piece slightly, without affecting it's function.  I'll probably do some other minor changes too.  That makes the knot on the bottom critical, I need to know how much I'm going to lose there, as it could make the blank too short to adapt.

I agree on using CA glue.  It works wonders for stabilizing knots and other imperfections.  Sometimes the little imperfections add a lot of character to the stock.