The part of gunmaking that I enjoy the most is the anarchy of setting to rough shaped wood with tools and creating form. I got the escutcheons in Monday, the Biesen buttplate inletted Tuesday and one of the forearms and the buttstock to near final form yesterday.
I put panels on the forearm and a cheek piece on the buttstock contrary to the Hoffman that inspired this project.
The file in the photo is a Grobet half round Vulcanite and is simply the most useful file I have every used on wood. It is tapered on both the fine and course side and this allows shaping of a wide range of curve radii as well as other shapes. It is aggressive and cuts smoothly. I keep a new spare at hand and it came out yesterday just for this work.
I am using my Canon G10 for the photography that I have been posting but am fast approaching the time when I need to have quality photos. Michael Petrov gave me his photo setup when he found that his time was very limited. Unfortunately, he passed away before I got a tutorial. It is an incandescent system and I'm hoping to use light boxes with speed lights instead. His camera is a Nikon 70S and I am using my Canon 550EX and 420EX flashes in 12"x48" light boxes. I haven't figured out how to disable the camera's pre flash feature so have a 3 second delay between the master and slave flashes. This works fine with shutter speeds longer than 3 seconds but this is not how I want the system to work. If anyone has experience that they would share about using light boxes and flashes for gun photography I'd be grateful.
Dennis
