doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DIY Gunsmithing @ doublegunshop.com Buttstock plug wood choice

Most traditional side by side stock are pretty hollow to get the weight down and to give good balance and handling with fine hand struck barrels. AyA�s are made in the traditional manner by hand. I have a Alex Martin sidelock with a leather covered pad. I have removed the pad once and there is an ovalish plug - the stock is probably hollow with the walls less than 1/4� thick. The barrels are lightweight 25� ribless and it handles beautifully. Most of the weight is between the hands. It would be wonderful on grouse (one day) but i use it on snipe and it has connected with several.

ok. gun as canoe paddle only in dire circumstances. got it.

At this point, the gun is all back together and waiting to be taken out for a spin at the clays range. I managed to fight the urge to drill out the center of the oak dowels.

I'll be hunting woodcock in the Atchafalaya Basin this winter, and that will be the real test of durability.

Thanks for the input.

I've used hickory ramrod dowels as long as I can remember, without a single issue. Just what I had around the shop. I bought an armload of them in several sizes at Friendship thirty something years ago.

SRH

This is from a 1896 Quality 2E L.C. Smith. It has a 7/8" hole drilled and filled with lead, don't know how far it goes into the stock but a Research Letter stated gun left factory weighing 9 lbs. On my postal scale it weighs 8 lbs. 15 ozs. now. It has 30 Finest Damascus barrels which had to be ordered along with the first style ejectors. You can see the duplicator marks.

This is from a 1908 hammer gun that had 3 3/4" holes drilled about 5-6" into the stock. I used one of the holes and made an aluminum plug and bored it out and put a screw cap on it.

You can see that I filled a few holes from other butt plates.
I used #6 shot and now with the set of 32" barrels, ventilated rib and beavertail for-end I use on the gun it balances right at the hinge pin.

Would you please explain the mechanism by which lead shot 'swells' and exerts enough pressure to split the wood? For sure it oxidizes, carbonates and reacts with tannins etc in the wood but why wouldn't those soft surface compounds expand into the spaces between the shot? I've seen wood split over a lead plug in the stock but the cause seems to be drying and splitting of the thinner sections of wood on the horizontal axis of the plug, not the lead swelling to increase in diameter.

OK, although I thought I had already explained it. Simply stated, oxidized lead occupies more volume than lead which is not oxidized. Lead shot has a lot more surface area than an equivalent weight of a solid plug of lead. Therefore, lead shot has a lot more potential to swell sufficiently to split a gunstock than a solid plug.

A similar thing happens with rust, or iron oxide on steel. And this is why you see rebar on construction sites coated with a green epoxy. Uncoated rebar rusts and swells, and actually breaks the concrete used in bridges and road surfaces. This also partly helps to explain why rusted nuts and bolts become so difficult to unscrew.

As an example, a few years back, I saw a G Grade Lefever on Gunbroker that had a long clean split from the buttplate about half-way to the grip. The stock was split on both sides. It looked bad, but it didn't appear that any wood was missing. The photos also showed that the buttplate was bulged outward. I immediately suspected that this was caused by a gob of oxidized lead shot, because I had seen this happen to other guns. The gun was otherwise in very nice condition, but due to the defects, I got it very cheap. When it arrived, I pulled the original Lefever buttplate, and my suspicions were confirmed. I had to use a drill to help break up the mass of oxidized shot. This mass of shot was extremely oxidized and solidified. There was lots of white lead oxide powder, so this work was done outside. I dug and scraped out all traces of it, and used compressed air to make sure there was no debris in the split wood. I glued the split with Titebond II wood glue and used rubber tubing to pull the crack completely closed. After the glue set, I turned a hardwood dowel and glued it into the hole where the shot had been, using epoxy as an adhesive. After refinishing, the repair is virtually undetectable. I had to heat the deformed buttplate with boiling water to soften it and restore the correct curvature because the swelled shot had pushed it outward. This was one time I was extremely sorry that I didn't take the time to take some before and after pics, and especially some pics of the heavily oxidized and swollen shot.

How to explain very old paper shotgun shells that aren't swelled and their roll or star crimp isn't pushed out? You open the shell and the shot is heavily oxidized-carbonated and often kind of all together in one clump with the surface compounds filling spaces between the shot.

Good question. Please remember that lead forming an oxide and a carbonate are two very different reactions. I assume you have heard about old paper shells swelling to the point that they can't be chambered? I certainly have. So how much expansion would it take before tightly packed oxidized lead shot split a gun stock? When surface compounds fill all the spaces between the shot, what happens next? Can you say for certain that all of those lead oxides are so loosely bound they actually move into those empty spaces? I couldn't tell you for certain whether shot in a waxed paper shell oxidizes at a slower rate than shot packed into a large hole in a shotgun buttstock. I can't tell you what conditions might accelerate this destructive process, or even how long it takes to damage a gun stock. All I know for certain is that I have seen it several times, and the result was a mass of slightly enlarged shot and a split gun stock. In the case of the G Grade Lefever I repaired, it was enough to visibly force the buttplate outward. In the Gunbroker auction photos, there was an obvious gap between the buttplate and the end of the stock... along with equally obvious splits along both sides of the shot filled cavity.

If you think that sort of damage would have occurred without the presence of heavily oxidized lead shot being stuffed into a hole under the buttplate, well that's OK. I can't force you to believe that which I have seen and touched and repaired. But I know I won't be putting loose lead shot into any of my gun stocks.