A lot of times you can salvage an old gun when you think it's beyond repair. As long as the gun hasn't been in a house fire, it's probably salvageable. Recently I had an old Winchester 94 come in that was pretty badly rusted. Bluing wasn't going to help because of how deep the rust pits were. Also, the bolt was rusted in the receiver. This looks like a custom job. ... The first thing I did was scrap the old stock set. Then I sandblasted the rust off the action and polished i

Next, I turned my attention to making a new stock. And since we're going wild here on this project, I wasn't going to make any old wood stock work. Instead of a factory replacement, I opted to carve one from a tree stump. My intention is to make a gunstock with a blend of wood and colored epoxy…. Sort of like one of those nice waterfall tables you see these days. I built a mold from thin plexiglass to put the stump wood in. I mixed two part epoxy with some blue dye, and po

Now I am ready to carve a stock blank. I put the blank in my stock duplicator and began to cut. Here's the rough carved stock. It’s got a long way to go before it’s ready. You can see it shows well in the Sunlight. The epoxy part of the stock is see through,

Now I begin the process of sanding the stock and fitting it to the rifle action. I start with 80 grit to get the roughness of carving smoothed, then work my way down to 220 grit. The project is progressing nicely. At this point I’m down to 400 grit sandpaper. The first of several coats of clear epoxy finish on the stock. There's a lot of burl, and spalt in the stump wood. Spalt is a type of fungus that grows in the wood and gives it interesting color patterns. The tree s

The beginning of the end of the project. I carved a new fore end and gave it the same epoxy treatment. The buttplate was cast from an original in a mold from the same blue epoxy, mixed with just a touch of teal green to make it look separate from the stock. The gun had the new stocks fitted. I gave the barrel and magazine tube a slow rust blue that results in a deep dark blue / black finish. The receiver got a gloss clear spray on Cerakote to protect the color case harde

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I had a nice piece of curly maple I carved into a gun stock. I knew it would be full of tiger striping, and I wanted a finish that would...

Making roses out of black iron or copper