Wow, this took WAY too long to complete. It's been over a year from acquiring the wood to final assembly. But life gets in the way of hobbies, sometimes.
35" black locust hole gun, open track, quasi-mid handle, with neptonics stealth reef trigger, ar15 handle, epoxy finish, 17/64" rife euro shaft.
Some modifications of the parts: for the tinman handle, i filled the recess in the trigger guard with epoxy, and milled it out for tighter clearance with the trigger, so as to eliminate any noise and rattling. I chamfered and smoothed out the trigger to feel nicer on the finger. I also ditched the 1/8" 308 pushrod in favor of a thicker, heat treated 17/4Ph 5/32" rod. I drilled the lever for an interference fit with the rod that I was able to easily tap out and adjust to the right length.
The locust was a real joy to work with. Smooth to cut and sand. I spent only two work sessions doing the actual woodwork, and the rest of the time trying to perfect the epoxy (which I ultimately didn't do, but the gun is more than adequately protected at this point).
I still consider it incomplete, in that there's some fine tuning to be done to pushrod/trigger interaction, as well as the tuning of the band setup, and the addition of some ballast to the muzzle. But the gun has blood on it, and it did what I wanted it to do.
The obligatory thank you's:
-Sweatloaf for the wood.
-TinMan for the handle and various other advice.
-Phil H for epoxy, and other advice.
-Josh for making a great trigger and changing the reef trigger lever to be a bit more
pushrod friendly.
-Dean at Vector Marine Products for giving me free reign (as well as advice and materials) in his machine shop.
