Recently, someone reached out and motivated me to produce a stock for them by making a surprising offer. When I started making these I initially decided not to take on commissions for fear that I would feel pressure to complete something quickly or fight against unreachable expectations, but in this specific situation both of those things weren’t true. With my daughter heading to college next year, I decided it was worth it to take up this generous offer and see if I could make someone happy.

I’ve finally finished it, but before reaching that point I sent the following email to the customer to detail the steps it took to create the stock.

Email (edited for a better blog experience)

I think I’m done, but I also don’t think this is a $(redacted amount) stock. That’s holding me back from actually calling this thing finished. I want to be totally transparent so you can decide if you want this at all. My feelings won’t be hurt if you don’t, in fact it would probably make me feel better that someone else sees the flaws as well. The following list is really for me to mentally work through this, but also for you to understand where I’m at. Stock is cut from the slab and looks good.

Resin is poured in mold

In order to improve, I decided to upgrade my resin to something that is stronger by the numbers. I never had a failure previously, but I just wanted to crank up to what I thought was a more professional resin.

Resin dries and is then fused to the wood stock.

Stock is sanded to final shape.

Stock is stained and sealed

Finish doesn’t look good enough. I attempt a fix it but sand through the stain to the bare wood and ruin it.

Sand finish off and start all over with second stain and second finish.

Finish looks great. Happy with it.

Although resin is black, paint with a high heat flat paint for a better look.

Go to the range to test-fire with plans of shipping it upon my return.

Range test shows that this resin will snap/break in thinner sections. Resin blows out at the mag release where the mag release bolt runs through the center of the stock.

Not happy as I return feeling a failure. Ticked that I went to all this trouble when I should have tested the new resin on a basic stock before putting all the effort into it.

Research better resin with impact properties that also include some flexibility in the material to absorb the recoil.

Buy new resin and wait for it to arrive.

Cut off defective resin.

Re-drill mounting hole in stock.

Test new resin for flexibility and toughness.

Perfect. Wish I would have done this step earlier.

Pour new resin in mold.

Take a long time prepping the finished stock with the new resin. Make sure not to damage the stock in any way.

Pour resin to attach the two pieces.

New resin is bright white instead of black. It can be colored but black feels impossible as it just goes grey. I can only use so much pigment before the resin chemistry would be affected.

Paint the new stock with high heat black paint. 

Load up 90 rounds and head to range during lunch. Blast as fast as possible in order to heat up everything as well as get back to work.

Gun is smoking but no failures.

Break the gun down to review how the shooting went.

Functioned perfectly without any damage.

I had painted inside the resin mold. Paint started flaking off on the inside, but not on the outside.

Research and find that I should have specifically washed off the mold release. My sanding on the outside did the job but the inside wasn’t sanded.

Clean off interior paint. Not as clean as it would have been without painting but luckily isn’t seen with the receiver mounted in it.

Wash resin

Paint stock again, leaving the inside not painted. It won’t see the light of day and I shouldn’t have painted it in the first place.

The wood looks great and the resin functions perfectly but one thing after another keeps popping up and I keep staring at flaws. At best this is a $500 stock based on the beauty of the wood, but there’s absolutely no way I’m selling this for any more than that.

And that’s the story of this stock. More than anything it’s a battle with myself trying to finish a project so that the customer is happy and I don’t go insane during the process.

I don’t charge the original price but feel so much better sending it out the door for the right price.

In the corner of my shop (garage, who am I kidding) I have a slab of walnut with extremely beautiful grain. I had tried to create a stock using my previous full wood method, but the walnut was just a tad bit too thin to make it work. I accidentally cut through the wall and set the piece aside with a little frustration.

When I started making the resin bed, I thought back to the damaged walnut piece and decided it was time to resurrect that beautiful piece of wood. That’s what you see here. I don’t know why I call it the Olyoak One, but it felt right and so I rolled with it. Maybe it’s because this is the look I’ve been searching for without really knowing what that would be.

Another difference you’ll notice with pieces from the past is the incredible shine I was able to achieve. I was walking around Bud’s Guns in Lexington, KY and took a look through the expensive gun room. The rifles that connected the most with me were the extremely polished stocks, and I decided to try it on this version. I love it. Many may not, but I make these to make myself happy, so I’m cool with it.

On a separate trip to Bud’s, I took the final rifle for test firing and ran through about 250 rounds in 15 minutes. Enough to smoke the barrel and really test out the strength of the design. It all worked well and most importantly it felt nice in my hands. I fired it with the M-Lok rail covers, and the wood was a perfect heat buffer.

So…. Is this for sale? Not yet, but I can make these faster than I have in the past and since I’ve made my first college visit with my daughter, I may need some extra college cash. Stay tuned.

A while back someone reached out to me about making a Dragunov version of the PCC stock and that’s where my mind started to wander first. I thought through how I would produce it and what would need to be different in order to make it successful?

The main difference and challenge is how to seat the receiver. With a wood stock, I’ve molded the resin seat for the receiver between two pieces of wood and receiver drops right into the wood stock. The Dragunov complicates it because there would no longer be wood on the sides to host the receiver, and the pistol grip shifts much further forward than how the PCC stock was meant to encase the action.

If I was making just one of these and not offering it for sale, I could have chopped off the end of the stock at the start of the grip and found a way to epoxy the remains to the wood stock I would make, but I want to make more than one of these things. That would require making a full housing for the receiver, which I have not done before.

First, I washed the stock that came with my PCC. Never fired, but dirty from always being referenced in the shop. I cut it about where the red dash is.

To make a mold, I first had to stack clay underneath the stock and about half way up the side. The lego looking holes in the clay are for registration.

With the sides attached, it’s time to pour in the silicone.

After it dried, I flipped it over, removed the clay, sprayed down some mold release, and poured in some more silicone.

After it dried, I pulled the two halves apart, removed the stock, and then put them back together and poured in my resin with fiberglass shards. The part then magically appears. You can see that while making the mold, I added some clay and the Olyoak logo to it on the side.

In the future I plan on tweaking the outer design but to start off I wanted to remove unnecessary complications and keep it simple.

I don’t have many of the process photos. I just wanted to get it going, but you can see in the mold that I have a section poking out the back. That’s what I inserted into the wood I cut out. I resin’d that together and then smoothed everything out.

I need to finish shaping, sanding, and staining the stock, and I also need to finalize the resin under the receiver into something that doesn’t look like the gray in my beard.

The idea is to end up making it look like this creation by Sean Byers for Onslaught DLC in COD.

I’m thinking of some paracord around the “waist” of the stock, but I’m not sure if I’ll do the grip in resin/silicone or if I’ll follow the sling option. It looks cool but it also looks uncomfortable in reality. I think a QD may work just fine, but we’ll see as I get closer to complete.

And here’s the final result. I’ll add more photos, but here is the main profile.

I took the summer off to prioritize time with my wife and kids but as school has started, and the temperature cools down just a little bit, I wanted to let you know I’m getting back into creative action. I don’t know exactly when I’ll have new pieces available, but plan on hits from the past, as well as a new idea for fans of the post-apocalyptic lifestyle

Summer is here and finding time to make the stocks is a little more difficult. I’ll be posting new stocks after the July 4th holiday. Have a wonderful start to the summer!

I’m working with Maple and a totally new wood that I’ll reveal when I finish it up. Cool grain and nice to work with.

1. Changes from version 1 to version 2
   1. Shape
      1. Tried to shave off more weight by really thinning the stock as it gets closer to your shoulder.
      2. Thinner around the grip and fits my hand a lot better.
   2. Finish
      1. Only placed resin on the end of the stock instead of the magwell and under the grip. I think it looks nicer.
      2. Semi-gloss polyurethane. Makes the wood come alive.
   3. Magwell
      1. The area that has slowed me down the most, so I tried to find a way to make it easey.
      2. Challenge is the Ruger area is complicated to do in wood.
         • I started making a couple resin parts but left most of the magwell as wood that I dremmel out. Still takes a long time.
         • Then, Vincyfanzo from Reddit recommended I just make the complicated section I’ve been carving, out of resin. Bingo! I made a mold of the area that’s been hard to replicate.
         • It won’t be on this Version 2, but Version 3 I will place the mold into a cut out section of the magwell and just pour the resin in. This will also allow people to use Ruger magazines!
      3. The default Ruger Glock magazine setup is way too loose. I made my own part to hold the mag in much tighter. There is zero slop and the magazine still easily falls when you hit the button.
      4. Made a fat mag release button.
   4. QD
      1. Remembered to add it on this version.

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I had too much material to remove by hand so I busted out some power.

Now I can go after it with the rasp and chisel.

The eventual design is starting to take shape.

Get

Amazing how this rasp can really grind down the area for your hand. I like this part of the work.

Made a mistake cutting too much of this hole out. Filled it with resin but didn’t mix it correctly and it never fully firmed up. Learning time.

After seating the action I marked off how much material needs to be removed to be flush. I actually left the magwell to the right at the extra length. I don’t mind it.

Getting much closer to the final shape.

After smoothing the stock I got the idea to pour resin on the exposed ends of wood. It felt more like just having an accent to the stock. I taped off each section, placed black die into the resin, and then poured it in. I really messed up on the bubbles and learned to not do some things. I think I’ll warm the resin in the future.

The resin fuses right onto that sucker. Then I sanded it down and promptly lost the smooth finish. 🙂

I sanded down until it was just the clean edge of black… or mostly clean. I was getting impatient.

The sanding looked like crap so I used my super flat black paint to finish off the resin.

A little more sanding and then time to stain it. I’m using a cognac color.

I was so happy at this point! So many flaws all over the place but I made this happen by sticking with it and just figuring out step after step.

The color below was shot with a color chart in the image, so that’s what it actually looks like. The above photo was in the garage with dumpster levels of lighting going on.

Figured out how I’ll fix those dowel marks on the right. Always improve by always learning.

Pay attention to the raised mag ejection button below. It should be flush but is sticking out a bit. I didn’t have everything seated correctly which helped the mag fall out while shooting.

First shots with the carbine. I had to rush back to give my son a ride, so I just shot 50 rounds. Luckily, I had one failure to feed, multiple unintended mag releases, and the bolt not locking back. Those helped me come home and fix it.

I was a little misaligned on my openings in the stock and thought it easier to just cut off a section that wasn’t allowing the mag to be fully secured.

The challenge that kept me from attempting this in the past is the magwell. I was worried about my ability to precisely place the parts necessary for locking and releasing the magazine.

After looking at the complexity, I decided to just go with the Glock version, although after finishing it all, the Ruger version holds magazines so much more securely.

After my initial review of the internals, I was a little worried I’d be able to pull this off.

I started by tracing the stock. I decided not to complicate this in any way and stick with the initial Ruger shape.

Placing the template over my Walnut slab.

Jigsawing it out. Pretty simple process.

Boom. There we are.

Rather than just making one of these, I’m anticipating creating more of them, so I started by making a jig to precisely carve out the inside. Using the original stock I then use a router bit with a bearing on the tip to map out the shape of the stock.

Have to keep the jig level.

I take the photos myself (for the most part), so I don’t have any of me routing out the inside. You can see that I came loose on that right side but didn’t screw it up totally. I also didn’t center it well enough, but it’s okay. I can thin out the side that’s too thick.

My wife checking in on me.

Because of the limits on router bit depth, I can’t route out the bottom section. I created a template to drill out the key points.

I then use the jigsaw to connect the dots. You can also see I’ve marked where the bolts go to hold down the action to the stock.

Fine tuning the jigsaw cuts.

Dropping in and fine tuning the magwell.

It fits! Of course you can also see how I didn’t think through it and cut the wrong shape where the barrel connects. That was supposed to come back up after opening for the shell ejection.

Always good to make sure it fits prior to spending any time shaping the stock.

It fits but you can see the trigger isn’t fully through. That’s because I left extra space for mistakes. I plan on cutting down the extra wood to meet up with the trigger.

Hardest part right here. Trying to make the mag release fit and work correctly. I didn’t do a great job but it does work.

It’s okay.

Decided to add back some space I cut too far. I failed though when my epoxy didn’t come out in equal amounts and ended up never setting. That was awesome.

Good idea, bad execution.

I try to clean up my bench every so often. It gets so cluttered after just a few steps.

The start to some shaping of the stock.

This is a cowboy chair (I think that’s what it’s called) I picked up in Island Park, Idaho. Very cool stool.

I think Kentucky Gun Co is a great place for any gun lover to take a visit but the ammo prices aren’t anything special, although like most places right now in 2022, there aren’t many deals to be had.

I can’t stress this one simple task enough. Right after walking into KYGUNCO, if you want to talk to anyone to find out more about a gun, or even pick up something you bought online or had shipped to them, TAKE A NUMBER BEFORE YOU DO ANYTHING ELSE. Before you go to the bathroom, before you check out ammo prices. Before you get distracted, grab your number or you will regret it.

They’re not the fastest place in the world but they do hold to their ticket system and you may get stuck if you miss that step. Then, take your time and peruse the animals lining the walls of the warehouse.

Took about an hour from walking in to walking out with my pre-purchased rifle.

As we were leaving I discovered that Radio Shack still exists. I had no idea they still had physical locations.

And, after a smoother return drive, here is the new purchase at home. This won’t be shot until I finish up the new stock, but it’s fun to see it in the original form. It’s a fantastic looking rifle without doing a single thing to it, but it’s going to be fun modifying it.