I do not know how many different guns I have built over the years. I do not even remember when I switched to blanks. Currently I only buy blanks to use a wood I cannot get by cutting on my little acreage, such as walnut. It is a personal thing as to what level you want to take your skills. Many of the advanced artistic builders are wise to use someone like David Rase as they are wasting their talents and time doing the more mundane tasks, specially those that resell their work. Again this is personal to me, but I get the greatest satisfaction in building a gun form the ground up. My thing is to buy the barrel and lock, cut my stock and build the furniture as much as possible. I do have one gun in the making that has its components mostly purchased for assembly but I used a blank. I also admit that it is not as much fun. To me to use a precarved would be like saying that the gun was built by say Chambers and myself as an example. Not knocking Chambers and think that he performs a valuable service, just stating my feelings.
Building from blanks gives one far more freedoms in building for length of pull, drop, hardware used and so forth. Another advantage in learning to do some of the more mundane tasks is that you can diverge for all different varieties of guns such as fowlers, smooth rifles and shotguns as well as rifles. We do this for fun and sometimes I think we may get too concerned about impressing others. Its up to you. Which is a more skilled project, one that is profusely carved and engraved but is mounted and assembled from all purchased hardware, with a lot of the basic stockwork done by someone else, or a poor boy made from the basics? That's your own personal decision.
DP
