Marlin model 1893 Project part 2

This is a long overdue continuation of this project.

If you missed part one, you can find it here

The first step in a restoration like this is the wood. It is extremely difficult to fit wood to a rifle that has nice bluing without messing up the bluing. 
So we will fit the wood to the metal, refinish the wood and then start on restoring the metal surface.

Part of the fitting includes the steel, crescent butt plate, it came with the gun loose and without any screws

I was able to source some NOS butt plate screws on ebay

To fit the butt plate I will remove the butt stock from the rifle. 

As you can see the tang screw is buggered up. Luckily the tang screws from a 336 are interchangeable and readily available.

The owner thought that the serial numbers were not matching, but indeed the upper & lower tangs have the same serial number

I will be using an arcylic, water based black paint (lamp black) to mark the butt plate so I can find the high spots and remove them. Some people would think Inletting Black would be more appropriate, but that stuff is expensive and harder to clean up.

You can see some daylight coming through the gap between the stock and plate

The first step was to make sure the butt plates mounting surface was smooth, a little file work removed the burs

  There was still some rocking of the butt plate, so I filed the top of the butt stock area flat, once I had eliminated the source of the rocking, I proceeded with the fitting.

We then coat the butt plate with the paint and press it to the stock to look for high spots

What we want to see is even paint all the way around the outside edge. The paint you see are the high spots. We will gently file away just enough material to make the paint disappear

Some say this can take as many as 50 applications/filing to get it right.

I quit counting after 20 or so applications, but we finally have what appears to be a perfect fit

Before drilling the holes for the screws we needed to remove the casting flash

 filed smooth

I searched the internet and found a couple of pictures that will help us with the placement of the holes.

I marked the holes with a center punch and drilled them with a 1/4" drill bit

 I counter sunk the holes as well

Stay tuned, now that we have the hard part done progress will come quickly