How I spent my winter vacation

It was a long cold winter. The spring was wet and then went directly from 50 degree temperatures to 94 degrees in the span of about a week.

I decided I needed something to keep me occupied through the dark months so I thought I would work on my muzzleloading rifle. Like the rifle before it, it decided to develop a crack in the stock after being shot a few times. Unfortunately I built this stock (basically from scratch...see before picture above) by hand and there was a lot of work in it. Rather than scrap it I decided to try and salvage it with a patch job. This was to take the form of a decorative plate epoxied on the side of the stock to reinforce the cracked area.

Initially I thought I could learn to engrave the plate, but after a couple of months of purchasing tools and floundering around, it soon became obvious that I wasn't talented enough (or patient enough) to pull that off. The fall back position was to etch the plate. This would allow me to liberally plagiarize some existing artwork. This wasn't as easy as it sounds either. It took another couple of months to figure out this process and collect the necessary goods to pull this off. After many fits and starts I came up with an assortment of artwork that I traced onto a transparent film at an enlarged scale and then reduced it to fit the actual part. This required a lot of practice attempts, 3 or 4 software programs, and a lot of scanning, pasting, and photoshopping. The plate was etched using a photolithographic process (again many practice plates were wasted in the process), and finally the end result was highlighted by introducing black paint into the etched recesses.

Next I drilled out the ends of the cracks to stop them from running any further, and epoxied in plugs to prevent them from growing. The stock was then inleted to accept the plate.

Finally the plate was epoxied in place and, voila, project complete. Did it work? Well, I haven't actually shot it yet. If it cracks again I may have to epoxy a plate over the self inflected gun shot hole in my head.

Cross your fingers.