ML, I made a similar post here this past winter as I have seen many hideous repairs over the years. I have been trying to satisfy my curiosity about the best and strongest glues recently. I planed some close grained and small pored black walnut and matched pairs of lighter and darker colored samples. I then glued them with Acraglas, DAP epoxy (slow set), Titebond II wood glue, Titebond Polyurethane glue, and a thin viscosity 1:1 boatbuilders epoxy. I took it a step further and put on a single coat of several common stock finishes to see if any was better or worse of concealing or accentuating the glue joints. My next step when I get some free time will be to clamp my pretty glued, sanded, and finished samples in a vise and smack 'em with a hammer to roughly guage the strength of the various glue joints. What I can tell you so far is that Titebond II is the least visible, closely followed by Acraglas, DAP, and Polyurethane in that order. The thin boatbuilder epoxy was worse, but it seems the closeness of the joint during preparation is the most important factor in getting a near invisible joint. The foam-out of the Polyurethane was messier and seemed to stain the wood a little deeper and took more sanding to clean up. The biggest surprise so far is the variation in appearance given by the various stock finishes. I plan to post my results in the future, but suffice to say that you can't just wet a piece of wood with water or alcohol and know exactly what the finished stock will look like. As the gunsmith in the first link provided by Revdocdrew pointed out, the darker finishes seem best at concealing the joint, but with a close fit and close match of grain and pore orientation, it can be near impossible to tell it was two pieces of wood. Hopefully, you have a nice clean break that fits back together well, with no missing pieces, and far enough back to avoid the inletting, and be concealed by the grip checkering. We should all be so lucky. And don't forget the re-bar.
