Going to attempt my first bedding job

[Southernfryedyankee]

Someone had mentioned Devcon plastic steel, would this be an appropriate bedding compound for a wood/laminate stock. Should I do a skim bed or a full bed? Does a full bed mean that I need to remove extra material from the stock? This is a picture of my stock, where else am I supposed to remove material from? I am leaving the tang alone and I am placing electical tape around the barrel to give a free float to where a dollar bill can wiz in between the barrel and stock with no hang ups. I will not be bedding the barrel channel. I will be using either kiwi shoe polish or the green turte wax (someone used it on a different site) as I would be able to see it better agains the black of the action and barrel. I am going to use play dough to dam everything up but am I supposed to let it dry first? Am I supposed to let the tang sit freely and put tape around the barrel? What happens if there is a slight incline to the rifle? Any advice would be great. I thank EVERY1 in advance

 

[bogie]

Try two wraps of tape on the barrel - toward the receiver and toward the business end. Do this until it starts to "float" in the receiver end.

I like Johnson paste wax.

Given that it's a laminated stock, you probably don't need to worry about hogging any "wood" out. A skim coat should do fine. Is there already pillar bedding going one? You might want to drill out those screw holes, and insert some pillars, but that is a little more of an undertaking. A skim coat is a very easy upgrade.

 

[bogie]

Oh yeah - a dozen or so layers of masking tape on the business-end side, and release agent all over, the recoil lug.

 

[Southernfryedyankee]

I dont have the necessary tools for a pillar bedding job. I feel confident in doing this. Where do I get the johnson wax from?

 

[bogie]

Your local wally-world or home depot should have it in the floor care section... It's the stuff that you use with buffers to make your barracks floor just gleam...

 

[Maj Dad]

Brownell's Accraglas

Worked well for me. I've used both the gel and regular ("runny") to bed wooden and synthetic stocks and in one case to fill in the disconnector cut outs on a GI fiberglass M14 stock. Worked like magic, and the kit has the release agent and mixing cups & stuff. I have others, but I prefer Accraglas. You can get all the accessories and things to make it easier from them at a very fair price. I get things from different sources, but this is my one-stop shop.
Cheers,
Maj Dad

(Bogie, we used the red dye wax on the old WW2 barrack concrete/whatever floors at Ft Polk in '67; you just sent me down memory lane... )

 

[Bart B.]

Devcon Plastic Steel has the least shrinkage of all the popular epoxy bedding compounds. It's tied with MarineTex in this regard. Accraglas has about the most as proved in dimensional tests.

Bedding tips......

If your epoxy's a bit too runny/thin when you mix it, it can be thickened with a bit of baking flour. Add just a little bit at a time then mix it until it's thick enough to be used easily.

Use about 1/10th inch thick bedding around the receiver. You'll need to rout out this much stock material to do this.

Put 1/32nd inch thick tape on the front and bottom of the recoil lug so there's enough clearance to easily pop the receiver out of the cured bedding whenever you want to. This also ensures the receiver itself will be in full hard contact with the epoxy and not bottom out under the recoil lug. Wrap masking tape around the stock where the epoxy will spill/squeeze out.

The thinnest possible coat of Simonize car wax has made my bedding jobs the tightest. Don't forget to coat the stock screws with it, too.

Be sure modeling clay is well packed into all the receiver recesses and stock cutouts to keep the wet epoxy in place and enable easy barreled action removal.

Pillar bedding jobs became the norm when the first synthetic stocks had such soft cores that they compressed with only 30 inch pounds of torque on the stock screws. Benchresters learned this years ago and nowadays most folks think pillar bedding is the "only" way to go. In spite of the most accurate rifles of 27 caliber and larger I know of have shot best with conventional bedding, either wood or modern hard-core synthetic stocks, pillar bedding seems to be a "must have" for accuracy. Pillar bedding makes the receiver have hard contact at only two or three points; conventional bedding spreads the contact pressure around much more of the receiver.

If you're bedding a round receiver, note that it may torque a bit loose after a few hundred rounds if bullets heavier than 160 to 170 grains are shot faster than 2500 fps. Whether or not you can observe the accuracy drops a bit when this happens is another issue.

 

[Southernfryedyankee]

Oh I did it already like a week ago it turned out great HAHAHA. here are the pics. I did get some low spots and a couple of 1 air pocket ( I think)

 

[Horsemany]

I would dremel off a layer everywhere and skim coat another coat of epoxy. You should have less voids. It should look perfectly smooth with a few air bubbles at the most. Don't worry about adhesion on the second coats. Epoxy sticks to itself very well.

 

[greyling22]

if you do a second epoxy job, don't get overconfident, in a hurry and sloppy with the release agent. you can get an action screw stuck with a missed spot the size of a bb and destroy the screw trying to get it out. not that I would ever do something like that. no sir, not me.