I chose to install a metal grip cap on this rifle. The first thing that I needed to do was flatten the grip cap surface. I chose to do this in the mill because it is really easy to make a flat surface with a milling cutter.
First I made some tooling to hold the stock in the mill. This was in the form of a piece of aluminum angle with a few holes drilled into it so I could bolt it to the stock and an angle block on the mill bed.
Then I used a 1/2 inch cutter to mill the surface down.
Here is the surface ready to install the cap. Nice and flat and at the angle that I wanted. Sometimes it takes more time to make the tooling for a task than it does to do the work. But I have found that it is really beneficial to take the time to make good tooling to hold things when machining.
Here are my supplies that I used for the grip cap. As I have said in other blog posts I don't like to screw directly into the wood. I like to make threaded brass inserts. I think that the brass inserts make a stronger joint, don't have any issues with splitting wood, and make lining up the screw heads easier and more repeatable during disassembly.
Again I use a brass machine screw to make the inserts. The external threads on the machine screw give the epoxy a lot of surface area to bond to and it is a cheap easy way to get the brass material.
First I mount the screw in the lathe, cut it to length, and drilled a hole.
Then the hole is threaded to accept a machine screw.
Here are the inserts assembled on the grip cap
The stock is then drilled to accept the inserts.
Here the cap is getting test fit prior to bonding.
Here is the cap during the bonding operation.
As you can see a lot of material needs to be removed from the stock. I will cover that in the next blog post.
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