jaeger buttplate

[omark]

im working on a TOW jaeger kit and the butt plate is killing me. its a precarve and the furnished plate is too narrow. its the widest plate they offer but to get it over far enough to cover the patch box cutout actually will cause some cast off. not necessarily a bad thing, but shouldnt be. ive even considered trying to expand the plate with forge and hammer, but not sure theres enough metal. please dont ask for pictures cause im challenged in a lot of ways, and electronically is one of the more severe ones.   gawd, i hate buttplates.   mark

[Curt Larsen]

Their pre carve is generally inlet for the acanthus leaf long tand butt plate I think.  I have one of their stocks and didn't like the acanthus leaf plate so swithed to the Edward Marshall plate.  It is about 1/8" wider on each side of the stock.  I need to remove metal from mine accordingly.  Check out the actual size drawings in the TOW catalog.

Curt L

[Stophel]

And you shouldn't have "some" cast off... You ought to have at least 1/4" of it!     Push that sucker all the way to the right!   

[JDK]

omark,

What Stophel is simply telling you is that the buttplate is not too narrow, the butt is too wide.

Any good precarve should have a little extra meat to allow for shaping and carving.

Is the stock inlet for the return - tang - on the plate?  If it is, then plate location has been firmly established for you...unless you do as Curt L did and switch to a plate with a wider return.  If the return is not inlet, do as Stophel says and push it right to cover the box dovetail and give you that castoff then shape your stock to it.

Hope that helps, J.D.K.

[Stophel]

German rifles should generally have very little drop, and plenty of cast off.  The face goes against the side of the stock (hence, the cheekpiece), not hunkered down over top of it.   

[rsells]

I am working on one of their preshaped stocks now.   It has the acanthus leaf finals on the butt plate.  The final dictated where my butt plate was positioned on the stock.  After I inlet the butt, I removed wood where needed and brass where needed to the sides of the back of the butt.  It worked out OK, but it was a bit of a pain to inlet especially where the final transitioned to the back of the plate.  Just go slow.  I don't like this pattern of butt plate because the sides of the final going up the comb are different on each of the sides.  I am one of those guys that likes everything equal on both sides, but it is just one of my mental things.  I think the rifle is going to look good when finished.
                                                                               Roger Sells

[Dphariss]

These are the same casting. One has been peaned out larger by careful hammer work on an anvil and a large iron rod about 3.5" in diameter and repeated aneallings. I gained length and quite a bit of width as well. Some of which I removed in final shaping so its just over 2" wide now.





Dan

[Stophel]

I suspect omark's buttplate is hard investment cast bronze, and not really amenable to much hammering.

[bdixon]

TOW's Jaeger plate is hard to work.  I went with the Marshall on mine.

[Curt Larsen]

I didn't like the acanthus leaf plate so I rasped off 1/8" off the top of the butt and switched to the Marshall buttplate and inletted that one.  I think Chris Immel's advice is also pretty good though.  I just didn't like that acanthus leaf plate.  I also used the Marshall trigger guard instead of the open jaeger one.