Building the BP trade rifle from a TOTW kit

[Claven2]

Made some more progress today as I started inletting the stock. On this one, the barrel channel was machined into the blank before I got it, but it was too tight for my barrel by probably 30 thou in width and the end of the barrel channel is left round so you have to square it up to get bearing at the back of the barrel. To do this, it's best to remove the barrel plug and set it aside. I then rough out the squaring by eye and start with inletting black brushed onto the underside of the bbl. This identifies the tight spots which I brought down with a small bastard file. I then put black on the back of the bbl and used chissels and small files to get the contact acceptable and square to the barrel.





Now is a good time to trim off the excess from the front of the stock. Leave it a little proud for now though since you don;t know the final dimension of the stock until you are done inletting the barrel tang and the nosecap at the other end of the forestock (later). Save the scrap as we will use it later as a test piece for the stock's finish



Here you can see there's pretty good contact at the back of the barrel. This is plenty good enough for now so I'm moving on to inletting the tang. First (and obviously) you have to re-install the tang into the barrel and then scribe out the rough location on the stock in pencil. I then use a special chisel meant for outlining cuts (I never remember it's real name but it's only sharp on one side so you can chisel in straight lines) to start the cut.



Now using a variety of chisels you start cutting the tang inlet by eye. Keep it slightly undersized - not oversized as we don't want gaps when we're done!


At around this point you switch back to inletting black and begin trial fitting the barrel frequently until you get nice contact. You also may need to slightly tweak the angle of the tang. The metal will be somewhat annealed from being heated before and you can do the tweaking in a vise. Note that the contact areas at the barrel shoulder are the critical areas that soak up recoil so pay the most attention to the fit in these places.



Normally you would inlet the lock next but since I still don't have the lock, I'll likely tackle the ramrod pipes next.

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