Hi, and thank you all for showing interest and encouraging Maria. She had a rough year. It was made worse because just as she was asked to be a captain on the Siena equestrian team, she dismounted a horse and in the process tore her medial collateral ligament and partially tore her ACL in her left knee. She is on crutches pending surgery this week. She won't be riding for a while. She still can work in the shop so she is not cut off from everything she loves to do. She is back at school but will be back with me in April for a few days.
I got tired of fixing other people's messed up Brown Bess reproduction locks so I went back to finishing my English sporting rifle. I decided to start making the dots in the wrist checkering. I am hoping to make this a 2-step process where I previously used a 3-step process. In the past, I would mark each dot accurately with an awl, punch it deeper with a pin punch, and then remove wood from the hole with a tiny twist drill. If the hole is just punched there is risk that when filled with finish it will swell and partially disappear. The drill bit removes the compressed wood eliminating that problem. This time around, I am going to see if that wood really needs to go, so I am just marking the holes with an awl and then punching them. If that is not sufficient, I can always go back with a No. 1 twist drill and remove the wood.
Professional gun stock checkerers wait until the stock has finish on it and the coats cured hard before checkering. In our case, we checker the large early English style diamonds before finish is applied because they are not fragile and that allows us to fix mistakes. However, making the dots is a different story. We checker the stock, then apply stain and finish building up several coats. We let them dry and cure and then go back and make the holes. Like chipping away the diamond points on modern checkering, punching the holes risks chipping away a quadrant. Therefore, having them strengthened and hardened by cured finish is desirable. So after putting on coats of finish, I go back and clean up the checkering removing any finish clogging the main lines. I use my checkering file for this.
I am very careful doing this as the wood with finish mixed in clogs the file quickly and you have to clean it often to avoid having it slip out of the line. Next I use the 60 degree Gunline single line cutter to lightly clean up the minor lines.
Once that is done, I brush the checkering vigorously with a stiff tooth brush which burnishes the grooves. Then I make the dots. First, I located them accurately in the middle of each quadrant using a sharp awl.
Then I use a flat ended punch made from a pin punch to make the hole larger. I tap the punch with a small ball peen hammer and count 4 strikes each time to keep the dots of equal size.
Hopefully, that does it. If the holes swell and fill up with more finish, I will go back and twiddle a #1 wire drill in each hole to remove the wood.
dave
