I know I'm overdue for an update. My day job and kids stole all my time over the last few months. So now that the latter have slowed down for the summer, I was able to get back at it.
While re-inltettng the stock, I found two more lateral cracks that could be spread apart on the side I repaired above. The sidewall is super thin there. So more epoxy. I skim coated the inside of the sidewall for strength, and went ahead and replaced a missing shard underneath.
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I think I forgot to mention a while back about pulling all the oil out of the end grain before all this. Make a paste with chalk dust and acetone, slather on all the oil stains, then gently heat with a heat gun. Oil gets trapped in the chalk and brushes off. I did this half a dozen times. It was really bad in the inletting. I then soaked it in a pan of acetone for a weekend. There was obviosly a lot of shrinkage. The excess oil soaked into the inletting, causing the frame to be loose. So naturally bubba torqued down on the stock bolts to tighten it up, etc. etc. here we are. Re-fitting the frame to stock proved a challenge with such dark wood. Since Jerrows seems out of business, I switched to neon yellow lipstick that glows under a black light (after I got yelled at for "borrowing some red", I went online and found my own). Time then to glass bed the frame and bottom plate to fix all this.
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Bedding on this is done in 2 stages. After inletting my repairs, I squared up the edges to the frame. This provides a reference point for the first bedding stop. With 30 thous or so relieved off the recoil stud so there was no contact (to make room for the epoxy), I roughed it up with a file to get a good bond. Then with dabs of acraglas in all the right places (and plenty of release agent) I clamped it all up. against the front edge. Perfect. Cutting away the excess around where the safety bar slides was a tedious challenge, but it all looks and fits good.
Now that I have the recoil stud and bedding under the tangs as a reference, I trimmed back all the leading edges maybe 15 thou or so. Step 2 is to then clamp it all up again and bed the leading edges. Why you ask? Well once it cures, I shave back the bedding to create the needed gap between 5-10 thou to prevent the same blowout from happening again. I now have everything fit up perfect, and with all the endgrain sealed with epoxy. If another bubba slathers oil on in another hundred years - it should hopefully hold up bit better than last time.
Time to start polishing the frame, steam out the worst dents on the stock...and figure out how I'm going to finish it all.
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