Glass bedding question

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kmw1954

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Just about ready to bed my first rifle and have one question. What is the generally accepted depth or thickness of the finished bed? How much stock do you generally remove to make room for the bedding material? I have not found a preferred measurement.

I don't want to hog out more than needed or leave the bedding too thin.
 
Based on how hard it is to snap an epoxy coupon, my goal is .25" thickness, or more! The more wood that is removed, the more epoxy that replaces wood, the harder and stronger the bedding. Epoxy, the good stuff like Devcon stainless steel, aluminum, titantium particle filled, is amazing stuff.

Ruger rifle, see how much I remove with a Dremel bit.

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Remington rifle

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I have routed the sides of the stock, this is a first production year M70

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and it worked well, Hard to prove that a thick layer completely around the receiver was better than lugs and receiver tang, but it did work.
 
Oly Wow, 1/8" to 1/4" that is a huge spread. Don't see how I could remove that much material from around the rear action screw in this Savage stock seeing as half the hole is already cut away to clear the trigger sear.
 
KMW all you need do is remove enough material to have the bedding hold onto the wood itself good and solid. If you undercut the action area with a small round saw blade it helps to hold the 1/8” thick areas firmly to the wood after you get the finish ground off. Also you need to remove all of the old finish inside the channel, the action and barrel areas plus the bottom metal areas where you will put the bedding. The saw blade works better to under cut than a drill bit. The bedding material must sink into the raw wood pores to get a solid grip on the wood itself and to seal properly.

I only use Acraglass for my stock work, repairs and bedding and have done so for over 50 years. It seals the wood against water, oil and solvents. You do as you wish.
 
Oly Wow, 1/8" to 1/4" that is a huge spread. Don't see how I could remove that much material from around the rear action screw in this Savage stock seeing as half the hole is already cut away to clear the trigger sear.

My rear pillar was notched out to allow for the trigger, we skim bedded forward to include the recoil lug. A good bit of work for not much gain.
 
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My rear pillar was notched out to allow for the trigger, we skim bedded forward to include the recoil lug. A good bit of work for not much gain.

Well I certainly hope I see much more than Not much Gain, because as-is when I temporarily put this stock on my groups went from 1.5/1.75" as 200 yards to 10+".. So by your comment I cannot hope for much and what ever is wrong with this stock isn't going to go away. So I hope I see much improved results or I just wasted a lot of money.
 
My friend, if your groups went from 1.5 to 10 inches after a stock change then NO amount of bedding will fix that. Re trace your steps you may find something on the action is on a bind or loose as hell.
Action bedding falls under the sub category of Harmonics, it wont fix a bad load either.
 
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After this little test session I replaced that Boyds stock with the original Savage stock and with 6 shots had it grouping back at zero.
 
You have to decide whether you are going to skim bed, or conventionally bed the action.

Skim bedding fills low spots, but largely relies upon contact with the original material - think about leading a hotrod - we fill everything with body putty, then sand down so the majority of the surface is the original metal, ONLY leaving filler in the low spots. In this case, the epoxy bed doesn’t have any structural integrity of its own, but rather it is only filling in small microvoids between the original material and the action.

Alternatively, conventional bedding will ask for a thick bed of epoxy, to ensure the epoxy bed itself has substantial structural integrity. It’s pretty easy to bend or break super thin epoxy wafers, so we want to add enough that it doesn’t want to readily flex. I typically don’t hog out 1/4”, but I do set a depth gauge on a drill bit (or router) in most of the action inlet and sink 1/8” guide holes, and after inletting, these are wiped fully by the rest of the cut, and typically slightly over cut, so I’d be somewhere greater than 1/8”.

In theory, skim bedding produces less shrink than conventional bedding, which SHOULD yield a tighter fit to the action, but it then fully relies upon the hair thin bedding holding strong.

Bedding jobs aren’t forever either. A guy can need to refresh a bedding job every so often, whether completely redoing the job or skim bedding again on top of the original bed.
 
Well it's sitting on the bench setting up right now. Hope this attempt returns better results.

As for bedding depth I cannot answer that for certain but I am guessing that I removed about 1/16" around the screws and mag well.
 
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