The Dale C. Maley Family Web Site

ScrollerOnline sells many different woodworking patterns, including a set of patters for wood guns. Here is a link to the gun pattern set.

Since I have never built any wood guns, I decided to start with something simple, like the hunting rifle with scope.

I always enter purchased woodworking plans into Sketchup for 2 reasons.   Often there is a mistake in the plans, and it forces me to understand the design.  As I draw it, I also think about how I will make the various pieces.  I use free Sketchup Version 7.

For nice color contrast, I used walnut for the main gun body, then maple for the other parts.  The dowels are birch, which is a light color similar to maple.

Recently, I built a simple little jig to find the center of dowels accurately.  Boy, I wish I had built this 40  years ago.......because it is so handy to use.......and gives perfect center marks. I used it on the dowels in the scope assembly to mark the centers, then drill them.

I did dowel the butt stop end to the main walnut body using two 1/4" diameter dowels.  End grain glue joints are very weak, and I did not want my grandkids to break off the end.

I glued on the paper pattern to a piece of 3/16" thick Luan plywood, to make a pattern.  I put the pattern and a 3/8" diameter oak dowel in the vise together.......and used the Dremel to shape the trigger from the dowel.........worked great !

Borrowing a trick Iearned on a previous project, rather than use expensive and rare Ebony, I just used a black magic marker to color the piece black, then the polyurethane really makes it pop.

I used an old oven to dry glued parts.........stained parts,...........and polyurethane coated parts.........very quickly.

This project was very straightforwards.   The centering jig mentioned above helped to make the scope parts very accurately.