doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com One of a kind?

I have stocked several guns with graft wood and believe that is what is on the S&W pump. Most of it is laid out with the base wood at the butt and not as prominent as the one shown. The blank KY Jon shows is not the way I am used to seeing a graftline blank laid out.
I have grafted stocks together a few times and the only way to make them work that I have found is to cut the old stock just barely behind the pistol grip and blend them together right behind the checkering. Even then you have to start with two sympathetic profiles. The one that worked best was a highly figured Ruger No. 1 buttstock grafted on to a Beretta Companion 410 shotgun (don't ask). When the junction was smoothed and the color blended with stain and then refinished, you had to get really close to see the joint in the profiled junction.

I have never been able to buy and English gun with a wood extension and a new butt plate. They can make a nice gun useable and are often really needed to adapt a midget's prize gun the the modern world, but most of them appear to have been done during an economic depression when every penny counted. Using the second or third piece of walnut seemed to have been way too much trouble and expense.

I also feel that the pump gun Ky Jon showed in the link has grafted walnut in the buttstock. However, that isn't really a very rare one of a kind thing to see, because a lot of Kalifornia orchard trees are English walnut grafted onto a more disease resistant root stock such as black or Claro. There is a market for grafted blanks for those who want something different, but I'd almost rather look at relatively plain wood or even a synthetic stock.

Most often, when sapwood is visible in a gun stock, it tends to run laterally with the grain rather than perpendicular to it, and it will often be stained to attenpt to match the darker heartwood.

A butt graft and a grafted blank are two different things. A butt graft is a good way to make a short, or too low at the comb stock into a usable gun. Crossedchissels gave a good demonstration of how to accomplish that on this board. A true graft blank is the joining of Claro to English that is done in almost every orchard in the US. This is that type of blank. And of the many thousands of guns I have come across, if not tens of thousands, this is the first factory one I have come across. If the gun was priced at $300 instead of $500 I would pick it up just as an oddity. It is odd, rare perhaps but does not increase the gun value that much to me. Just a fun thing not a big thing.