doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Worn, Beat Up, Damaged Checkering in Restorations

Forends seem to take the most abuse and sometimes dents cannot be steamed out before recheckering. Any suggestions on what to do?
A)What I have done on some is to lightly refinish then fill with epoxy before checkering. Then stain lightly and refinish the entire checkered area. Pretty good results but room for improvement. I have one with a very poor attempt at recheckering that I see no option but giving it a good cleaning and a light coat of finish and then filling.

B)If the area is not severely damaged but still needs more than just a recheckering, sometimes a light sanding, light refinish, then stain and rechecker.


Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thank You. Gil

First strip the finish, and scrub and scrub and scrub, with a nail brush and kitchen scouring powder, the checker to get all the crud and oil out.

Make any repairs to any chips or splits, dowel fill and re drill screw holes as necessary. Steam out any Dents as best as you can, sometimes the ones that don't lift can be carefully chiseled out without ruing the lines of the for end.

Then freshen the chequering with the appropriately spaced tool.

If the for end is really battered. If you can get away with it sometimes its better to just scrub it out and re lay out the pattern, however often there is not enough wood in the for end to to that without ruining the shape.

Gil if enough wood I take note of where master lines are and cut them slightly deeper with single line cutter and take skewed wood chisel and scrape checkering of like wolf said.Be very careful at edges of pattern then rechecker pattern. Bobby

Hi Gill. Checkering as you have found out is the one area where the use of steam on dents more often than not does not work, possibly because the wood fibres are cut many times in such a small area by the checkering process that the steam can�t be driven into the wood to swell the damaged fibres. Though there is a way of repairing checkering but in many cases it is not worth the effort unless it is a very high value gun. It is done by cutting out the damaged area down to about 1/16 of an inch if you can the deeper the area is made the more successful the transplant will be, with the removal cuts being done along the bottom of the existing checkering lines (a medical scalpel works well because it has a fine blade). The cut out area usually ends up in a diamond shape where you can transplant a small piece of wood the same shape using a top quality Adhesive, now you can harvest slivers of wood from under the forend Iron and from under the trigger guard strap if the timber has to match exactly. If a close colour match is not really necessary just use any piece of walnut and stain it to match as near as possible after you re cut the checkering using a triangular needle file rather than a checkering tool and if done well the repair is invisible. This type of work is not for the feint hearted and needs to be practiced before you let yourself loose on an expensive gun!!

I have had good luck with shellac and rottenstone. Steam out the dents as far as they will go, then use a rottenstone/shellac slurry to fill the remainder of the dents and the wood grain. Sand. Dye stain the wood to match the butt stock if needed. Then finish, preferably with ... shellac for at least one coat. The result is some dark spots that match the grain. You can also use shellac sticks as patch.

Small defects can be inlet with new wood and checkered and then blended to match. If very careful it can be invisible. I had one stock that the owner knocked off an area of checkering about the size of a fifty cent piece. Deep and nasty gouge it was. He wanted not only it repaired but wanted a small palm swell in the general area. I inlet an new piece of wood, shaped it to give him a small palm swell and the checkered it. By the time it was done it look factory original and I still hate palm swells to this day. But he was a good friend and I could not talk him out of it so I did it. Sometimes working on friends stuff can be the least satisfying.

I am always surprised at just how good things can turn out.

This XE Fox was a crusty basket case when I bought it. Craig Libhardt of Susquehanna Stockworks did wonderful job. There was a deep gouge that you can just see to the left of the ebony forend tip in the before picture. I do not even notice it when I look at it anymore.







He also put an extension on it that was needed. He blended it nicely.

Very nice gun.