1: Custom Mauser '98 2: Sedgley '03 Springfield 3: Remington Model 700 4: Cooper Model 22

While I am on the subject, a bit of reinforcing can go a long way toward making a stock stronger. Installing a through bolt just behind the recoil lug is often seen on rifles chambered for hard-kicking cartridges. The Weatherby Mark V stock has an interior metal rod running the full length of its grip, and a couple of shorter rods are bedded inside the midsection of the stock, one behind the recoil lug mortise and the other behind the magazine cutout.

We also hear tales about wood stocks swelling up and warping when subjected to climatic changes, thereby causing a rifle to go off zero. But of the many rifles I have owned through the years, only one had that problem. I could zero that rifle during summer, and come cold weather, it would shoot low. The following summer it would be back to its original zero. Regardless of the temperature, the rifle would stay zeroed for several months, and for this reason I never had a problem with it during a hunt.

While minor expanding, contracting, and warping of a stock can cause a rifle to shoot to a different point of impact, it usually takes place over a period of weeks or even months rather than suddenly. The important point is, I own many wood-stocked rifles--some new, others built as far back as the early 1900s--and all maintain their zeroes as well as rifles wearing stocks made of other materials.

Friends who work for a couple of the major firearms manufacturers tell me that walnut stocks have begun to make a comeback in popularity during the past few years, while sales of synthetic stocks have dropped off a bit. I am glad to hear that because it means there are a lot of other people like me who enjoy hunting with rifles wearing Mother Nature's finest wood.

Laminated Lumber
I have no idea who first formed a riflestock blank by gluing layers of wood together, but during World War II the Germans did it due to the scarcity of solid blanks thick enough to produce a one-piece stock.

The first laminated stock I owned came in semifinished form from E.C. Bishop & Son of Warsaw, Missouri. After a bit of sanding, finishing, and fitting it to a 1903 Springfield barreled action in .22-250, I had what was considered a red-hot varmint rifle during the 1960s.

One of the first factory rifles to wear a laminated stock was the Remington Model 600 in 6.5 and .350 Remington Magnums. Whereas the typical stock of today is made up of many thin layers of wood, the stock of the Model 600 consisted of two layers of maple sandwiched between three layers of walnut on each side.