Just a note for anyone interested. Not too long ago I was really active for a few years in a .22 benchrest association. I did pretty well, winning three different National Championships in four years, in different categories. I did all my rifle building, and experimented with varying lightweight stock designs. I experimented with carbon fiber as a reinforcement, and ended up builing an unlimited style bench stock that weighed less than 1-1/2 pounds total. This compares to a typical 5-7 pounds. I made it from laminations of aircraft grade balsa wood, paulonia (used for wooden surfboards), and carbon fiber. The stiffness was unreal.
I have worked on two or three lifter parkers recently, and all of them suffered from headstock failures of one kind or another; from cracks, internal cracks to complete breaks.
This is where purists should maybe step away.
OK. SInce this is not an original and not supposed to particularly copy one, I decided to see what I could do to strengthen it. Before starting the actual inletting after roughing it in, I trued the head as perfectly square and flat as I could, then laid on a layer of biaxial carbon fiber tape across the face of the head, set in saturation epoxy, and clamped it to the action to fit it. Later, after getting the inletting close, I basically removed the internal cuts in the lock areas barely deeper than the depth of the lockworks, leaving the outer perimeter areas untouched. I then made a teflon plug slightly smaller than the locks and laid in two layers of the same biaxial tape on all the inside surfaces of the locks recesses. I clamped in the teflon plug until it dried. I cut a rim to support the locks against the carbon fiber layer at the proper depth, and after cutting the recess for the locking bolt, I reinforced the inside of it with a layer of oriented fibers set in epoxy.
The point of this was to build a completely reinforced composite headstock structure which would be strong and not crack under recoil. Call this experimental gunsmithing, but I wanted to try it out. It could turn out to be a good tool to solidly repair a cracked stock. Yesterday, I made up some moderately stiff loads and tried the new stock with no untoward results.
When I break down the gun for checkering, I will take a couple of pictures and post them.
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04-18-2022, 11:51 AM
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