"Things I Learned From MY Father"

My father had a hobby-shop, where he built custom-stocked rifles.  It was a business, in the sense that he sold rifles.  Those sales provided him money to buy (and build) more rifles for himself, and eventually for me.   He called his business "The Stock Shop", and it was based in a corner of our garage.

But it was more of a hobby, than a business.  All he really wanted to do was to build beautiful rifles, and then prove that they were more accurate than anything available on the "open market".  Which he did.

He never owned a rifle he wouldn't sell. He use to make new rifles (often on the Springfield 1903-A3 war-surplus frames that he would by through the NRA for $25 each), and tear the Springfield apart to build something completely unlike what he started with.

He once built me a beautiful .30-06 for my first deer-hunting trip (when I turned 13), and it was so beautiful I almost cried.   It have a spring-loaded magazine base-plate that looked like gold.  Actually, it was anodized tin, and too light, but I was small and skinny and he was trying to save weight.   I loved that short little ought-six, and killed my first deer with it.

But by hunting season, he had got into the fast/light bullets thing, and insisted that I try the 100-grain hollow-point bullets he made by boring a cavity in the heavier Spitzer bullets that he could find.

He was right; the fast/light combination was a guaranteed one-shot kill on light game like Mule Deer.  But the first and only deer I killed with THAT bullet (running left-to-right, on a hillside in Eastern Oregon, at 100 yards) ... was a mess.  There was a tiny little dimple on the near side, hole the size of my thigh on the far side.  We lost a lot of meat, and cleaning the game was excessively yucky-making.

I killed three deer before I learned that usually, the hunter needs to bleed-out the meat first.  My meet was always bled out by the time I got to the gutting part.



Gun-making was always a 'Learning Experience" for Pop.


My uncle was a machinist, and had a fully equipped machine shop in HIS garage.  So Uncle Shorty would turn the barrel, and whatever other process that Pop wanted and wasn't equipped to do himself.  Pop could do some things, like jewel the bolts and drill and tap screw holes to mount scopes.

Then Pop would get down to the part he loved the best:  making a new stock.   I travelled with him several times to Portland where he would pick out a slab of beautifully grained wood, define the action and barrel dimensions, etc.  A week later the rough blank would be delivered and Pop would get to work.

He was looking for accuracy and beauty.  Form follows function, but he loved building roll-over combs, palm knobs.  Often his stock choice would use exotic woods in combination.  For example, here is a picture of a .25-06 he built using a Springfield 1903-A3 rifle he bought from the government for $25:

(also available at full-size at IMAGESHACK)

The wood is Quilted Maple.  The fore-end tip and pistol-grip cap are of California Redwood Burl.
The inlays are of rock, called "Morrisonite" and is a viriety only found at a small ranch in Eastern Oregon ... Pop had a rock-hound friend who would bring back samples of rare finds.  It's good to have friends.   The redwood Burl came from Uncle Shorty, who collected rare woods as well.

The forearm is flat-bottomed, because I said I thought it looked better that way.  He didn't agree, but he did it my way.  Not everybody would find it as comfortable, especially if they were accustomed to shooting rifles with rounded fore-ends.  But I have big hands, and a weird off-hand stance, so with a sling support it works better for me.  I've always liked rifles with some bulk.

The scope is a Leopold 6X.   The finish on the positive-action '03-A3 safety is wearing off.  He built this rifle for my 16th birthday present, and I've used it for jack rabbits, deer, and Prong Horn Antelope in three states.   I've got on shot kills on antelope at 400+ yard distances, and snap-shot hits on running jackrabbits at 20 feet.

The black spacing around the inlays, and between the Redwood and the Maple, is actually glass-bedding compound.  When building the stock (which took weeks working on weekends and evenings after coming home from his Day Job as a Millwright at a sawmill) he got a perfect fit on the match but decided to add a 'spacer' for esthetic reasons.

He didn't say it that way.  He said "Don't you think this would look better with a black line?"  Since I already knew he was building it for me, as a labor of love, I agreed wholeheartedly.  And he was right, of course.

He had me hold the rifle to get the distance right between the buttplate and the trigger.  He said "you haven't got your full growth yet, so I'm going to just put a thin buttplate on her.  When you quit sprouting, we'll put on a recoil pad and whatever spacing we need to get the distance right."

Which I did, and he did, and the rifle still fits like it was made for me.  Which it was.



This is the second-finest rifle I've ever owned.

The first-finest rifle I've ever owned .. well, I still have that one, too.  It's a .22-250 on an even more exotic maple stock, with the heaviest barrel he could find.  I wanted him to leave the barrel blank full-diameter the whole length, but he wouldn't do that.  He said it looked dumb.  So he took it to Undle Shorty, who taper-turned it down to a quarter-inch smaller diameter at the bore, and then crowned the bore.

I haven't shown my archival photos of that gun.

This is the prototypical varmint gun.  I wanted all the weight of steel I could get in the barrel, because I knew I would be shooting a LOT of shots in an afternoon hunt, and I wanted the barrel heavy with iron to minimize the warm when shooting from a cold barrel to a hot one.

So they turned the barrel, but I insisted that Pop leave as much stock .. especially on the forearm .. as possible.  And they did agree to that.

The gun weighs something in the 15-pound range, but I wouldn't be carrying it on a hunt.  I'd just be finding a shooting point, and always shooting from a rest.

 (Pop built "Shooting Sticks" of tubular metal, with a metal spike at the bottom and with a foot rest you could use to stamp it into the ground;  mine, he build with a wide flat horizontal rest to accommodate the stock profile.)

Pop was getting old and achy, by that time.  I must have been in my late teens.  So I took over doing the "sighting in" and "bench rest testing" part for him.  He was short and stocky, with no neck at all; I was tall and lanky, with a neck like a goose.

Every time I shot a big-bore rifle, it like to broke my neck.  I complained, he grunted, and then he handed me the next load .. usually, it was a more powerful load.

I shot for him the .30 Belted Newton, the  .338 ... both of these he had a local german expatriate who also made bore-breaks drill holes into the fore-end of the barrel. His name was Muller, and he had patented the Muller Muzzle break.  About forty holes 1/16" holes  in lines in the first four inches of the barrel (which was bored oversized).   If that made the recoil any less punishing, I didn't want to find out.  But it did make the damned things exceedingly loud.

The main effect was that I quit bitching about getting whiplash with every shot.  I had watched a couple of times when Pop was shooting one of the monster-bore Muller guns, and quickly decided that it was more comfortable to be INSIDE the 'cone' than standing OUTSIDE it within 100 meters!

I once shot Pop's 7mm Magnum at a running jackrabbits  I missed.  Well the Jack was 100 yard away and running like the cops was after him.  I never got the lead figured out, and by the time my magazine was empty and I had decided I was wasting my time and about 50 grains of 4831 with each shot, the Jack was over the hill and halfway to the next county.

And I was bleeding from my right eyebrow, from four separate places.

The last scar healed first; I wasn't shooting down-hill then, so the scope (which was not really spaced for my long neck, but for Pop's short neck) didn't hit me so hard.

So I went back to the .25-06 for running jacks.

---

The next fall, Pop took the 7mm and I took the .25-06 to a desert county in SE Oregon to hunt Prong Horn Antelope.

I got a great buck .. the Bull of the Herd, who had passed his prime but was still fending off the three young bucks who had been hassling him for the three days we watched the herd before the season started.  He was wily, I got buck-fever and missed him at 80 feet (too close for the 6X scope), so when he turned and scooted, I had a bad quartering-angle through sagebrush.    I hate that angle on a running Prongie .. all you can do is break them down; you can't get a decent killing shot.  I hoped to catch him behind the brisket if he jogged right; instead he bounced left as only Antelope can change direction that suddenly, and I broke a hip.  it got ugly from there, but I tracked and found him, and finished him off.

It was ugly, it was messy, and I was just back from Vietnam.  Pop came up on me standing there, wet-cheeked, and said something about "that's okay; any man who can't feel the shame of a bad kill isn't somebody I want to hunt with".

Then he walked away and left me to deal with the consequences of my bad judgement.  I never took a quartering-away shot again, and I never will.

I took that buck to the taxidermist station, and payed more than I make in a week to have his head mounted.  It's a big\t Prong, 14-1/2", with the tips busted off from fighting.  I hung that "trophy" where I would see it every day.

And I think of my Pop, every day.  Who knew that this scrub-farmer family would breed a man with such gravitas, such impact on his children?

I've tried to live up to his example.  I never will, of course.  But it makes ME a better man, having such a shining exemplar to emulate.

The next morning, I watched Pop kill a standing broadside Prongie from about 200 yards away.  That 7mm hit the spine where it connected with the shoulder, and the buck folded like a mannequin with the strings cut.   And that was the end of that hunt. DRT.

If you're going to hunt, you owe it to your prey to be good at your craft.

He was the Master of the clean kill.

In later years, his eyesight began to fade. He was near-sighted, and the glasses got thicker as the years went by.

In the last hunt, in Eastern Colorado a bunch east of Cheyenne, I spotted him a wonderful buck about 200 yards away in the tall dry grass.  I tried to point it out to him, but he needed the scope to see it .. and couldn't find it.

Finally, he said to me:  "You take it; I can't see him".  I refused.   We let the buck go.  Back to camp, and I cooked up a mess of Spaghetti.  Did the dishes, and he was asleep in his bunk by the time I finished the dishes.

He didn't even get out of bed the last morning.  He sent me out to do my hunt alone.

I went out and took a doe on an "any sex" license, so we wouldn't go home without meat. Scrawny doe, and I've never butchered a doe before.  But I got the job done, and the meat tastes fine.  Pop wouldn't accept any of the meat:   "Your kill, you eat it" he said.

I never expected ... well, a lot of things that I've learned about People since then.