Thread: My latest project - Remington 40x

This is my current project that I am working on. It is a very early Remington 40x in .22lr that has a custom made 3 position stock in the Freeland style. As you can see from the 50 yard 5 shot group using cheap ammo the rifle is a shooter, but then one would expect that from Remington's top of the line Custom Shop rifle.




The original stock maker is unknown and nothing is known about when the stock was made, but this style was state of the art in the 50s. This sort of harmonic tuner is very old school. Today they use a device at the end of the barrel to tune harmonics rather than tensioning it mid barrel.



You can see the very rough work around the hand grip area where the previous owner used a rasp to shape it to his hand. Pretty ugly!!






After removing the hardware I started stripping off the cruddy old finish. I am trying to leave the stock as close to original as possible while smoothing out all the rough spots.







At this point I have cut and fitted a butt pad and steamed out as many of the dings as possible, the one that are too deep or where the grain has been cut will stay. I soaked some of the problem areas in stripper to leach out as much of the old gun oil as possible from the walnut the area around the rear of the receiver was black from powder soaked gun oil.

I started hand sanding with 100 grit and and currently down to 220 grit. I'm almost ready to start hitting it with 320 grit paper. Then 400 grit and it should be ready for some Remington Red stain and a hand rubbed oil finish, I figure 20-30 coats should do. It should be ready for the range by summer.