Thread: Re- Stocking - Sportico Model 44

I have to tell you I know very little, tending to nothing, about guns. In fact the last time I fired a gun was December 1978! However, a friend and work colleague asked me if I could make a new stock for one of his rifles and I said "Yes." Knowing what I do now I probably would have said "No. Can't help you with that."

My friend is using this particular gun, a Sportico model 44 made in Australia, for target shooting at a nearby range. It was originally made in the late 1960s and this particular example is around 1970/71 I believe. It is a sniper rifle and it was designed with the hope it would be adopted by the Australian army. Apparantly it performed very well in testing and was preferred on accuracy, but it was not adopted because it was a single shot and the army went with another rifle that was a five shot (you never know how many soldiers the enemy has)

This is the orginal stock.

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I realised fairly quickly that there were quite a few complicated angles involved mainly centering around the tapered flute in which the barrel sits, but also in the shaping of the stock. I made up a dummy out of scrap pine first up to prove I could form the groove satisfactorily

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and then went on to laminate some Ironbark to make up the new stock.

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The request was to make the new stock heavier (the original was light for carting around in the bush) and I anticipated the Ironbark would be around twice the weight. Everything was going according to plan until I slipped with the router and also hand drilled a hole out of alignment.

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That was the end of that blank and I now had to find something else! I had some Forest Red Gum, but nothing long enough. I resorted to a chunk of Spotted Gum, which was fine except it wasn't going to be quite as heavy as I would have liked. In fact it ended up being just over half as heavy again as the original stock The original was a little under 900g and the SG stock about 1.5Kg. I don't know what that orginal timber is.

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I made a pattern up from MDF the same way as I make saw handles. I normally cut the blank out roughly with a jigsaw but in this case a bandsaw, but before that I had to rout the groove in which the barrel sits. I used four diffferent size cove cutters. The smallest diameter went the whole way and the larger diameters were used progressively. The added complication was that the groove was not the same depth throughout the length. I solved this by placing two battens either side of the blank and raising them at the toe. It also gave a wider bearing suface for the router to ride on. The transition between the cove sizes was smoothed initially using a cove cutting moulding plane and then sandpaper around a former.

I didn't have a cove plane to suit but did have a shoulder plane. I made it into a cove cutting plane and replaced the blade made using a piece of leaf spring steel. This was much thicker than the original straight blade and took up a good deal of the very large gap at the mouth. I had to modify the wedge to suit.

There was much adjustment needed, but I came to realise that the barrel is only held at two spots by Allen bolts. The front of the barrel floats above the timber. The original stock had cutouts for the fold down steel sight but today a telescopic sight is used so I did not have to allow for that.

Once the groove for the barrel and the cutouts for trigger and holding bolts was established the basic shape was accomplished with a series of flush trimming bits on the router against the mdf pattern and the rounding of the underside was done with a large rounding over bit. Then the Spotted Gum, particularly at the butt, was shaped initially using an angle grinder with coarse sanding discs after the bulk of the waste had been cut off with the bandsaw. I made extensive use of rasps before finally resorting to elbow grease and hand sanding too.

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A couple of coats of BLO were applied, allowed to dry and then followed up with three coats of matt varnish. After a couple of days for that to dry the stock was treated to Scandinavian Teak Oil rubbed in with steel wool. It was then buffed with a soft rag followed by a lambs wool buffer similar to those used on car paintwork. The resulting finish has a satin hue and super smooth.

The pix have played up so I will post some more in a moment.

Regards
Paul