This is my second gun I started July 2018, however life got in the way and I got tangled up in various other things. I’m quite lucky to have (had) access to a mill and got the rail channel and the mech pocket sussed from the get go. I was planning to do a whole lot of experimentation with it, and did quite some screw ups I’ll go over in the pictures so you don’t have to.
This round of lockdown let me dust off the old lady and continue where I left her three years ago. So this is the state of today without workshop access, but a small router, a rasp and sanding paper…

Not too confident in my epoxy job, I decided to thread carbon tubes in an X-pattern through the length of the stock to avoid delamination in the future. This went well to start with, but I lost concentration towards the end so they’re ever so slightly misaligned. Again, I put this into the experiment basket and are still happy tinkering with what I got.
Time to get pocket and track done.

Wow, thats a work of art

Thank you! Gun is 95(ish) from last hole to mech, shaft 130/7mm. The completed length I don’t know yet, though I’ll leave a longer loading butt (short arm syndrome). The shaft is a 17-4ph Sporasub with a pretty wacky flopper, looking forward to seeing how that goes.

Now is the time, Catchelot - one more week (or more?) to go.
Ok, here’s for another c*** up on the gun, but I was to wound up to take pictures, you’ll see the results in the final anyway. When planning to rounding off the square blank I needed to fill in the holes of the carbon rod so that the bearing of the router bit could run smoothly along the edge. For that I stuffed them with dowels and thought that may do the trick, one side towards the muzzle still had a thin strip of mdf attached which in hindsight was the better choice of course.
I grabbed the biggest and meanest table router bit i could find (I think around 60mm?) and got my beefier mate to push the stock as hard as possible against the bit – you see where this is going – the bearing pushed the dowels deeper into the rods resulting in a very unique pattern on the bottom of it, but only partly. I decided to make it a design feature again and named them “hydrodynamic speed dimples”. They’re not this bad, I won’t bother sanding them out, but rather add some to make it even. Will see.
That was the event that let me reconsider and put it aside till now. In the meantime I invested a bit more time in the handle - this again took me ages and uncounted sanding drums, but I’m very happy with the outcome, especially since my first gun’s biggest fault was the distance between trigger and handle end. For this I made my own micarta and experimented with different epoxies, dyes and cloth. I cut up a whole lot of high vis vests and for every 2 layers of this colour used 2 of white cloth. What I learned - high vis looks awesome in micarta if alternated with white. Pick a white cloth that stays white when wet (dipping the cloth in water is a good indicator of what the final hue will be). Alternating with dark cloth looks nice too, but a bit dull. Use white resin dye if you need the fluoro pop even more. Finally I mixed the micarta with teak and started sanding… and then some more sanding. I regularly checked for fit wearing my dive glove and managed to slowly rotate my grip by carving out an indentation for my palm. Now the handle fits like a glove - think it was worth the effort, I learned lots about resins and how to clean them up from the shop floor.
Next updates will be a bit slower to come, the small router demands bloody jigs for the tiniest cut, haha

This round of lockdown let me dust off the old lady and continue where I left her three years ago. So this is the state of today without workshop access, but a small router, a rasp and sanding paper…

 And that is the part I really l appreciate.
And those who think cant do it no tools and ability.. well no machine tools , basically by hand means slower  more carefully and next to no mistakes..
 Doesnt take a phD  just bit of common sense hand saw, file, sand paper and time..

got some more stuff done, rasping, sanding and routing on the muzzle. Also added a swivel and the buttpad plus a tad more hardware. Unfortunately I got a bit too confident and cracked the muzzle when putting the final screw in… not too much damage done, me thinks. I filled the screw hole with a dab of epoxy, put the screw back halfway to push the resin into the crack and called it a day. This (literal) screw up let me reflect on the overall strength of the muzzle, so I figured the limits of the teak the hard way. Got me some fibreglass tape yesterday and will patch it up today.
Only thing left then is to ballast it and maybe buff it if I can be bothered. Quite like the matt look and it will be bashed around anyway.

Hmmm. I’m tempted to use tung oil or danish, though on the other hand I’m quite curious how it will age and weather over time. Last year I talked myself into staining the deck (as you can see in the pics) and tbh I prefer the untreated silvery gray.

Oh, re-reading my post, I noticed it could be misunderstood. I’d never stain the gun, heck no. If at all i’d use Danish or teak oil, I’ve had all kind of projects done with either oil, PU, epoxy, you name it (the only stuff I never tried is two pack pu, but i never needed nor liked the super gloss/glass like finish).
My friend made a gun from teak and never used any treatment and it holds up mint, so I’d be keen to go the same way… I can always sand back a tad and buff it up in case I have a change of heart. Great info though, Steps, I appreciate your input!

second to last update:
After some reinforcing the muzzle with glass, I finished the gun yesterday and will give it a go later. Wish me luck
(yes, it needs ballasting too, I’ll find out today how much lead it needs).