Stockmaking

Winchester 94: Rough shaping the stock, continued..

Time to make the top of the stock look less like a block. The process for the top mimics what I did on the bottom. I did use some yellow grease pencil to make the lay-out lines easier to see. Again, I worked on small sections making sure everything stays level and in symmetry.

Start

Left and right first quarter removed

Left and right first quarter removed

Wood pattern on right side

Rear roughing done - right side

Rear roughing done - left side

Rear roughing done - top

Rear roughing done - bottom

In the next post, I will continue at the front end of the stock and work on the pistol grip.

 

Winchester 94: Rough shaping the stock

I am finally going to start changing this block of wood into something that somewhat resembles a stock. Since I started with a fairly thick wood blank, I decided to use the band saw to trim it down a little. After establishing a center-line for the blank in line with the rifle center-line, I marked  out the width to which I wanted to cut the wood.

Marked out

And we now have a thinner stock. I saved the cut-off wood for small future projects.

Thinner!

The next step is to mount two templates that I made in my first semester. First up is the grip cap.

Grip cap

And then the butt plate template.

Butt plate

These templates help me to shape the stock. Now it was time to do some layout work on the stock again. I divided the stock in four equal parts at the butt plate and just behind the pistol grip. I also added the following guidelines to the top and bottom of the stock: top, 0.625″ (1.58cm) just behind the pistol grip that expand to 1.25″ (3.175 cm) at the butt plate and bottom, 0.625 (1.58cm) for the length.

Layout

Now it is time for the shaping to start. The first step is to bring the pistol grip area down to roughly the thickness of the grip cap template on both sides.

Pistol grip

Now it is time to start using the layout guide lines I grew earlier. Rough shaping the stock is done in a few steps and you work with only a small part of the stock. I started with the bottom left side of the stock. First, I filed a small guide groove behind the pistol grip.

Bottom left

I worked this quarter of the stock down to the first set of guide lines. I also had to make sure that the wood stays fairly flat. The tools I used to remove the wood was the flat micro plane and the #49 cabinet rasp. As both of these are fairly narrow, it is not easy to keep the wood flat. This of course applies to all the future work too and is even more crucial in the later stages of shaping the stock. A dip in the wrong place can spoil the looks of the product.

First quarter

Next I worked up to the center-line of the stock.

Left bottom half

The process then repeats on the other side. It is important also keep symmetry between the left and right side during this process. This photograph was taken during the process.

Right bottom in process

Now it is time to narrow the guide-lines at the bottom of the stock. The new guide-lines are 0.25″ (6.35cm) wide.

New guide-lines

And the process repeats. I did make a mistake here. When you get to this point is not needed to do a front guide slot anymore. Lucky for me, it was not too deep! As the process is the same as before, I am only posting a few pictures to show the progression down to the point where the bottom part is rough shaped on both sides. You will also notice that I am slowly shaping the transition area to the pistol grip.

 In the next post on this project I will show the rough shaping progress of the top part of the stock.

 

 

Winchester 94: Inletting the bottom of the stock, starting to remove wood from the blank

After I completed the inletting on the top tang, I started with the lower tang. The lower tang is not fixed and that makes life a little more difficult. Furthermore, the screw that holds the receiver in the stock passes through the top tang and secures in the bottom tang in a blind hole on this model. So, not only did I have to work this down to the correct depth, I had to be really careful about how the hole will be drilled for the screw. I am showing a select few pictures of this process but it did take some time! First though, a picture of some of the tools I use. This shows the chisels, a #49 cabinet rasp and a micro plane. I some of the top bags of the tool roll is some scrapers and some needle file rasps.

Chisels, #49 cabinet rasp and microplane

 

On to the stock work:

Starting

About halfway

Still not enough

And finally, after many hours of work I am done.

Done, with lower tang in place

Top tang area

Lower tang area

Next, I drilled the hole for the tang screw. No pictures of this, but I must admit that my first pilot hole was incorrect. Luckily, it was a minor mistake. Then the rifle is mounted back in the stock blank. This is the point where I start removing all the bits that do not look like a stock!

In the beginning..

I started by removing material from the top of the tang area:

And the progress starts

Then from the bottom tang area:

Lower started

After I completed this, I removed the rifle from the stock blank again and used the original stock as a rough template. If you look carefully you can see that outline on the wood.

Outline

After I created the rough outline, I used an electric bandsaw to remove the excess wood and mounted the rifle back into the stock.

 

This is a good place to wrap up this post. In the next post of the series, I will do some layout work and start forming the stock.

 

 

Winchester 94 two piece wood stock

For Basic Stockmaking I chose to put a new stock on a Winchester 94 Black Shadow. Introduced in 1998, this variant of the Winchester 94 was discontinued in 2000. The Black Shadow comes with a black composite stock. The wood for this project I purchased from a former student in the gunsmithing program. The picture shows the wood blank, the original stock and the blank for the fore-end in the background.

 

The first step was to inlet the top tang:

In this picture I finished the top inletting. The black marks you can see on the wood is from inletting black. Inletting black is applied to the metal part that fits to the wood and shows high spots in the wood that still needs work.