The resin I use is designed for commercial boiler repair. Since I do this for a living there are some things I prefer to keep "in house."
In a nutshell, here's the things I really try to pay attention to:
- Use a resin with the properties I mentioned earlier
- use a resin with a long open clamp time
- Mix the resin on a flat surface rather than a cup.
- Put a pan of water on the stove and heat up your resin tubes prior to mixing.
- Warm your resin with a hot air gun to bring any air out of suspension, pop them with a tooth pick or dental pick. (this takes practice as you can cook the stuff if your not careful)
- Have EVERYTHING in place before you mix your stuff.
- Establish an order of operations that works and works for you. there's no wrong answers here, just use common sense and be meticulous.
- Ensure your barreled action sits the way you want it to in the stock before you clay it or put release agent on it.
- Spread a layer on the action and the stock.
- Mask everything you don't want epoxy to stick to. I tape the entire stock from one end to the other and I make little "pull tabs" of tape to peel off the bulk of the mess because it never fails; when I peel the skins off the stock I always seem to get a sliver of bedding under my fingernail(s) and it hurts like hell. I'd be a terrible POW.
That sums it up.
Here's a few additional photos to illustrate. Bear in mind I've made some special tooling to help facilitate all this. Number one being the pillar design I have and two the "bedding Jack" that lifts a barreled action straight up from a stock. Rocking is pure poison as it'll potentially tear the hell out of the recoil lug area. Last is I do ALL my own inletting. a cardinal rule in my shop is I will not build a gun on a stock that's been inletted. There are a few exceptions but they are limited to the "gee wiz" stocks used in Olympic and international smallbore and 300 meter competition. Those kinds of guns basically get reworked as I machine blocks of walnut to fit in the stock in the trigger well/mag well area, then bed, then go back and machine the trigger well/mag well all over again. More work but the end results are worth it IMO.
Anyways, hope this helped some.
All the best,
Chad
It starts here: Fitting the barrel to the receiver. Has to so I know where my start point is for writing the barrel channel inlet. I use surface models in CAM software for all this stuff.
Next is a surface model of the receiver. I start with a generic model of that particular action (make/model) then move stuff around so that pillars are in the right locations along with the other features. They ARE NOT all the same. Even when it's two identical receivers!
Now that the puter work is done its off to setting up the stock in the mill. The real secret here is in the work holding. This fixture is one I made. A pair of Kurt vises should illustrate the level of seriousness. They cost about a grand a piece! The stock is now qualified in height and centered on the X axis of the machine.
Now were makin chips. I use a surface model so that I have a bit more control over how the inletting gets done. It takes more time to machine this way, but I think it's worth it. As you can see the tang area is just boxed out. This is an archive pic of how I used to do it. It's been revised quite a bit since then. It's now a virtual mirror image of the action's features. It's a bitch to draw and program sometimes, but the end result is far better I think.
Stocks now inletted and everything is ready for the next step.
As I said, fit everything before you clay/release the barreled action. Don't want slimy stuff in the stock. Resin hates slimy stuff!
Actions all clayed and slimed now.
If bedding were art that is what it would look like!!! Very nice!!!
