Axis Stock Reinforcement Made Difficult
So, I wanted to use my factory stock for a lightweight 450 Bushmaster project I've been working on. The Apache barrel I won on eBay is a bit on the heavy side, and since I imagine Jim is at the bottom of a pile of order emails (including another one of mine), the weight would have to come out of the Boyds stock I had selected. The problem, of course, is that the standard barrel channel would not accommodate the roughly varmint contour barrel. I tried heating and bending the rails to no avail.
I then came up with an idea. Remove the rails along the barrel channel, lay up some fiberglass fabric around the bottom of the forend, and fill the resulting gaps with filled epoxy. Previously I had laminated some fiberglass cloth to the stock using Acraglas, so I was confident in its strength and adhesion.
Step one was to cut off the rail. Using a vise and a small hand saw, it took all of five minutes to remove all the material above the reinforcing ribs from the tip to just in front of the recoil lug. Next, I stripped off the old paint and TBC until I had the old fiberglass layers exposed. I then took some measurements and used them to cut out three or four rectangles of ~3.5oz deck cloth.
The stock itself was braced in my gun cleaning vise upside-down with the forend extending entirely to one side. I used my new standby 4:1 epoxy, TAP Plastics Super Hard, and laid up the layers using a chip brush to manipulate the layers. Once all the layers were in place, I covered the assembly with a piece of baking parchment and squeezed out any air bubbles. The parchment also allowed me to hold the loose-hanging layers in the correct shape while the epoxy cured.
Once the epoxy set, I turned the stock right-side-up in the cradle. I covered the barreled action in tape and release agent and mounted it in the stock using plumbers putty and masking tape to dam the front and back of the channel created by the fiberglass layers. I mixed up another batch of epoxy and filled it heavily with micro balloons until it was the consistency of thick cake batter. I poured the epoxy batter into the channel around the barrel and presto: free floating barrel channel.
After that, it was just a matter of trimming the excess fabric, sanding down the tops of the rails and tip of the forend, and blending the edges. Currently the stiffness is pretty darn good. Unfortunately, the steel and unfilled epoxy from the previous stiffening project left this only half a pound lighter than the Boyds laminate! I have an idea for an improved version. With any luck, I will have improved photography skills by then.
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