My friend asked me to help him build a rifle. He has shot a rifle of mine that's in a Boyd's tacticool stock and he was insistent on using one for his build. Problem number one is he's left handed. Boyd's does offer the pro varmint (new tacticool name) stock in left hand, but only in detachable mag and regular barrel profile format. He wanted to stick to blind mag, and stupid me told him we could make it work. Oh, the donor rifle was one of the retarded Savages from the 90's, the flat back long action receiver chambered for short action with a short action blind mag. The stock we received was probably the worst Boyd's stock I've ever worked with. The cuts were uneven from side to side, there were tooling marks visible through the finish, sharp edges on one side and rounded on the other, etc. I was not happy with the stock, but he decided to continue on and work on it.
Details for the build are:
Savage flat back left handed long action with short action caliber
Boyd's pro varmint stock
Boyd's metal trigger guard and action screws
SSS trigger and recoil lug
EGW picatinny scope rail
Large knob bolt handle from MidwayUSA
Cerakote and Kydex adjustable cheek piece by me
And the most important part is a Blackhole Weaponry barrel chambered in 260. I can't say enough good things about these barrels. They are fast, accurate, and easy to clean. I use nothing but their barrels on my AR's and have given up using Shilen and Criterion on my Savages. I'm slowly converting all of my older Savage builds over the BHW barrels.
Lots of area to fill in!!!
Example of bad cuts on stock
Bolt opening hits the bolt. It's rubbing up against the bolt the whole time it moves down to lock.
I blasted the original finish off. I found a piece is 1/2" oak board that looked like it would work perfect for filling in the void on the stock. Below are pictures of forming the board to the stock. At this point, I also hogged out the barrel channel for the larger barrel profile
There were big voids under the new piece so I cut some filler pieces of wood.
Holes drilled for the pillars. I made a mistake and used the brownells pillars I usually get, the set that has a long one and short one. Well, because everything on this is doomed to go wrong, the long one was too long and the short one was too short.
My solution was to use the long in the rear and cut it to size and use the short one in the front and make an access for the recessed pillar. I took a piece of 1/2" copper pipe and cut a hole in the new bottom wood where it would fit up against the pillar. I also had to hog out some of the wood in the bottom piece because the blind mag went just enough below the stock to interfere with it.
I bedded the action and pillars. I put screws up through the bottom piece into voids I filled with the bedding (Devcon) to help secure the bottom piece. I then finished sanding and contouring the bottom wood now that it's secured to the rest of the stock. This was one of my worst bedding jobs ever. Nothing has changed with this project. Nothing goes right.
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