Walnut stock crack7/5/2023 ![]() One method is to cut out a rectangle along the guard strap and trigger strap, then cut a new piece of wood to fit tightly into it. However, the hand of the stock is subject to a lot of flexing and stresses, so we often take extra steps. Modern glues are very strong and they will do a good job as long as you can get them to adhere well to the wood either side of either crack. So, in extremis, we resorted to the ‘glue and screw’ technique. In both cases, the value of the gun was about half of the cost of restocking. The other (a Gibbs side-lock), embarrassingly, belonged to a client and, while entrusted to Parcelforce and packed in a hard plastic gun transport case, arrived at its destination in two pieces, clean broken through the hand. He learned the hard way that a gun stock is not the most effective club for despatching wounded bunnies. ![]() One, a William Powell 16-bore I was given by an aged local chap, who had smashed the stock when he was a youth while ferreting. I was faced with two such problems recently. If it is a family gun, then the cost is academic (as long as you have the money). It is very unlikely that most of the guns that suffer the damage today will be worth restocking, unless sentimental value wins the day. A restock job on a boxlock will cost at least £3,500 and a side-lock probably £5,000. Returning to the immediate problem of today’s sportsman with a broken stock, he is faced with a dilemma. Brass plates screwed onto and around the grip are common and, in Africa, it was not unusual to see wet buffalo-gut straps wrapped around a cracked stock, shrinking tight as they dried and holding the wood together. Once smashed, history shows that repairs could be, and were, made using some novel approaches and locally available materials. ![]() These were sometimes chequered on the metal to match the chequer on the wood. Another, less common, feature was to extend the lock plates, which then become slim braces, right down the hand of the pistol grip and ending in a metal grip cap. Some built in a longer top strap, extending over the comb, to produce greater stability this was sometimes mirrored by extending the guard strap in a similar manner. Unsurprisingly, gunmakers came up with a number of novel solutions or, at least, designs intended to render breakage less likely or debilitating. You certainly would have no opportunity to have a competent gunsmith deal with the problem for you. It is bad enough if you break your game gun on a pheasant shoot in Surrey, imagine how much worse if you were an explorer or hunter in Africa in the mid 1800s, your most vital piece of equipment ruined and your life perhaps dependent on it. Gunmakers and their customers have wrestled with the problem of stock breakage since the earliest days of the sporting gun. More than an inconvenience, this represents a huge financial outlay, often one that will cost more than the market value of the gun. I have had guns brought in for restocking that have been put on the back seat of a Range Rover and sat on, or leaned back on while in a slip, only for the owner to unslip it for the next drive and find it in two pieces. Any sharp blow in a lateral direction, or leverage of a similar kind, will snap the stock at the wrist, typically around the area where the hand-pin hole is drilled. What these stocks do not respond well to is being dropped or sat upon. If reasonably well cared for, a properly made sporting gun stock will remain in place and intact through hundreds of thousands of fired shots and decades of carriage in the field. There are plenty of examples of stocks made a century and a half ago in regular use that still do their job with confidence and ease. Actually, it is fairer to say they are vulnerable when subjected to stresses they were not designed to withstand. Gun stocks are weaker than you might think. ![]() What options do you have if your gun suffers a catastrophic stock break? Diggory Hadoke takes us through the possible solutions
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |