Very nice
@ken erickson .
You might get a kick out of this. Kimber used to own a small facility in Costa Rica where all of the fiberglass stocks were made, and where much of the wood stock checkering and finishing was completed. It was a crazy business model, but amazing pieces of AAA French walnut were cut into a near net form in Yonkers using a CNC process. Aluminum pillars were added, ebony forend tips were added to some models, and all the inletting was completed and then the stocks were shipped to Costa Rica.
Any stock with wrap around checkering on the forend were entirely checkered by hand e.g. the Super America stocks. Stocks that didn't have wrap around checkering on the forends had the pistol grips hand checkered but the forends were left untouched. All the hand sanding and oiling was done in Costa Rica which was a fixed cost facility at around $625k/year regardless of how much work was being done there.
When the stocks came back to Yonkers, any stock that didn't have wrap around checkering on the forend was machine checkered by an unskilled worker. You wouldn't believe the number of stunning pieces of walnut that were tossed into a scrap bin because the lazy morons running the checkering machine couldn't be bothered to get it set up correctly. Some employee took those stocks home on a regular basis and burned them for heat! All of that work and cost thrown in a scrap bin. It was hard to wrap my head around that to be honest.
I thought you might find this interesting. I appreciate the beauty of a nice wood stock but only have one really nice example which is a Kimber K22 Classic but with a Super America stock. I have two Lee-Enfield Mk4 No2 rifles (one unfired) and three Marlin JM stamped lever actions, but most of my rifles have either the chassis, cabon fiber or injection molded types of stocks.
I really should have bought a Caprivi in .458 Lott when I worked for Kimber, but they were hard to come by, even for employees.
Here's the K22 with hand checkering. I think your work is as good as this which was done by someone who did it all day, every day.
