Leather Covered Pad (with a twist)

The gun is a Holland Royal and the client specified a 14 1/2 inch pull length, nothing unusual there, except that the pull length was 14 inches to the wood and he didn't want the stock cut if it could be avoided.  This meant that the pad had to be 1/2 inch thick.  The pad also would have to be of a construction that was deep enough to get screwhole plugs from, which ruled out any currently available Pachmayr and pretty much anything else.  What I needed was a half-inch thick Silver's no.3 but there is no such animal.  Well, you know what they say about necessity being the mother of invention.  I took a standard one inch Silver's and separated the red, "soft" rubber portion from the black, hard rubber base and removed the needed amount from the inside of the soft section.  I then reattached the pad and base and proceeded as usual.   Why not just shorten the pad from the back?  I'm glad you asked.  Because a Silver's has an oval pocket molded into the pad portion that is deep enough to keep that from being a workable solution.  The gun also had a pretty good example of a badly done leather covered pad, the dreaded leather covered hotdog bun.

Before:

The shortened Silver's pad:

The finished job:

Beretta ASE 90 Stock Repair

This is a Beretta ASE 90 that suffered a broken buttstock through the webs where the hand joins what would normally be called the head.  In this gun, the stock is very thin in this area because of the added frame width, necessitated by the detachable trigger unit.  It appears to have suffered a side load applied to the stock, sufficient to crack the wood.  How it happened, exactly, I do not know but the grain structure in the area didn't help matters any.  There are some that think grain flow doesn't matter in a drawbolt application, they are mistaken. 

After chipping the loosened synthetic finish from the broken areas, the separated parts were prepped for reattachment to make certain that the repair would be as invisible as possible.  Once all was back in one piece, I machined it internally to accept ply and carbon reinforcements.  After that, the inletting was recut, the repaired area was refinished and blended, and finally, the checkering was recut.