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: