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On your shaping .
. See its all about the lines and proportioning . Take the comb . Bring the nose of the comb down so that from the heal of the butt plate to the nose , you get a strait line . The line should intersect at the top of the tang to ¼ back ..
Also don’t trust the angles of casting . Most times you will need to do alittle tweaking . The comb line should be strait and continues through its entire length . That includes the butt plate area .
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The length of the comb is then proportioned to the length of the wrist using a 3 to 5 scale . IE from the b from the breech end of the barrel to the heal is 5 . Then the comb will be 3 .
A simple way to do this without getting deep into math , is to make a set of dividers that are pinned to the 3 to 5 “Golden Mean “.....
The other thing I would point out is the use of sanding blocks is a must .
Lets look at the photo of your nose cap . See how the stock dips just before the wood . Before you start the final shaping of the forearm . , leave the wood a little high and thick . Put on your nose cap and then block san the top of the barrel channel down to the top edge of the nose cap . Then come back and bring everything in tight and smooth . Doing that will get ride of that little dip and give you again , clean un broken lines .
Sane with the belly under the lock mortises . Bring that area on down so that it blends smoothly and thinly into the trigger area .
Thus you will end up with less block lines .
Which will be real important on your long rifle .
Again nice job . Not bad at all . Well done
Captchee, I really appreciate the input. I have a couple of questions for ya though to clarify things a bit. Here is a pic that shows the top of the wrist:
If I understand you correctly the angle along the top of the comb should intersect about a fourth of the way down the tang which would be about 1/2 to 3/4 inches behind the front screw? Also the bit about not trusting the angles on castings is good to know... the misalignment of this one is probably all my doings however.
Here is a pic from when I was fitting it while the stock still has a beavertail cheekpiece, I never noticed at the time but you can see in the pic that the angle of the buttplate nose is too high.
I am familiar with the concept of the Golden Mean, but I confess I didn't apply any of the rules when I built this rifle. I need to keep that in mind on the next one.
As for the nosecap - I was careful to use blocks when sanding, what i think happened here is my taper to the cap is way too short. Ill attach a couple of closeup pics for you to look at an let me know what you think.... in one of them you can see a line where I had to glue a big chunk of wood when I removed way too much. I had a lot of trouble fitting the nosecap, after a phone conversation with Wyosmith one day he gave me some pointers and I basically started over with it after doing some "damage control".
As for the belly under the lock mortises, I thing I understand your meaning there. I went much deeper with the trigger than I thought I would have to, I probably should have soldered some metal on top of the trigger bars - I think that would have helped smooth out the transition.
Thanks again, I really enjoyed building this rifle and hope to continue on and improve with each one. If you see anything else here please let me know.
Curtis
Topic: My first rifle build, Flint Hawken (Read 1642 times)