Repairing a broken stock

[David Price]

Considering  that I am not supposed to go to work in my shop for a few more days I figured that I would go back into my computer and look at some old pictures just to amuse myself.  I came across this set of pictures of a rifle that I repaired for one of my customers years ago.   He had used it quite hard over a few years, shooting numerous deer, elk, and bear and the rifle stood up to  it all quite well.  The bad news is it fell off the wall in his office and broke the rifle clean off at the wrist.  I thought that some of you might enjoy seeing how I repaired it.


The first picture shows how clean the break was so the first thing that I did was to glue it together using  white carpenters   glue.  The next thing I did was to set it up in the milling machine and mill a 3/8 slot almost all the way through the wrist where the trigger plate was, to within an eight of an inch of the other side, which went across the break. If you look into the milled slot you can see the crack.

I then cut a very hard solid piece of maple that would just fit into the mortise very snugly and glued it in place.  Clamped it up for twenty four hours, and recut the trigger back into place which completely covered the new block of wood  nicely.

The crack in the top of the wrist  was quite noticeable so I decided to put in an oval silver inlay with his initials on it. As you can see in the pictures,  it covered most of the crack.

All I had to do then was to work a little stain and finish into the crack, and put several coats of finish on the damaged area using just my finger tip.   That was several years ago and he is still using that rifle today.

[smylee grouch]

Neat fix Dave. Rescuing a still usefull and nice rifle.

[rjpalmer]

Amazing !

[oldtravler61]

  David exceptional repair. Your customer must have been very happy. Oldtravler

[Marcruger]

Nice job.  Almost invisible.  Great save.  :-)   

[Daryl]

  David exceptional repair. Your customer must have been very happy. Oldtravler

Ditto!

[n stephenson]

Ditto on ALL superlatives !! Very nice repair work. I had one of my own rifles that fell to the shop floor and snapped clean in two , luckily I had the trigger guard off  . Try as I might , I did end up with a hairline . Kudos  on a fine job . This can be a daunting task especially on a piece this nice.    Nate

[Mike Brooks]

I always fix stuff like that with a wood welder.