Thread: New lightweight stock

Bit of catching up to do here - mostly recovering from my catastrophically dumb mistake. If you missed it, there's the perfect amount of clearance to cycle the bolt, but not enough to remove it! It's pretty embarrassing, but that's what prototypes are for.

First step is to chop out the absolute minimum of material required to remove the bolt:


You can also see here that I've bedded the action.

Then comes blending the new shape in. A lot of work with rasps, files etc:

This was a bit scary as I was more or less free-handing the design, rather than having spent hours working it out in CAD and letting a robot do the fine work for me.

Then I shaped a plug to go in the cavity that was left behind, and glued it in place. I should have taken more care with the fit of this, as I'm not really happy with how it turned out - but the next prototype won't have this mistake to cover up, so I'm not too worried


When the epoxy had cured, I started sanding off the machining marks and smoothing things down.


Because the timber is so sensitive to grime and dirt, I layed down a thin coat of epoxy just to seal everything up. Really brings the colour of the wood through!