A synthetic stock doesn’t have to look like a synthetic stock. The McMillan fiberglass stock on this Weatherby Mark V in .416 Magnum has a wood-grain finish.

The idea was actually born of necessity as walnut blanks in the higher grades have become increasingly more difficult to find and quite expensive to boot. Plain-Jane blanks of sufficient thickness remain reasonably abundant, but at the opposite end, nicely figured blanks are becoming scarcer each year. They are also priced far beyond the reach of many hunters and shooters.

Supplying wood for riflestocks is small potatoes to lumber mills when compared to the amount they sell to the furniture industry, and since many of the products produced by those companies do not require wood of great thickness, a very large percentage of the world's walnut is sawed into sheets too thin to be used in making riflestocks. What was needed was a way of making that supply of walnut thicker while still retaining its natural beauty.

The solution was to use a powerful adhesive to bond two blanks of walnut to a thin walnut spacer in order to come up with a very handsome blank thick enough to be used in making a stock. Then somebody got the bright idea of placing thin sheets of carbon fiber on both sides of the spacer before bonding the three layers of wood together. And since the walnut filler and the carbon fiber measure only about a quarter of an inch in total thickness, the fact that the stock is of laminated construction is hardly noticeable.

After the blank is inletted, shaped, and its exterior is finish-sanded, it is base-coated with a clear polyurethane. After that coat has dried, the process is repeated five more times. The stock then receives a top coating of clear DuPont Imron, which is the tough skin worn by many automobiles and by some of the more expensive synthetic stocks.

At first glance the Ultra Wood stock from S&K appears to be one piece rather than laminated, but a close top view reveals a quarter-inch-wide spacer consisting of a narrow sheet of walnut and two layers of carbon fiber laminated between the two thicker layers of walnut.

Moisture is kept at bay by applying the finish to all surfaces of the stock, including beneath the recoil pad and in the inletting. What they end up with is a stock possessing the warmth and beauty of fine walnut but one that's stronger and more stable than nonlaminated walnut. It is also a bit lighter than the typical stock made of multiple wood laminates; the stock you see in the photos is on my long-action Remington Model 700 in 6.5 Swedish and weighs 40.5 ounces on my postal scale, about the same as the factory BDL-style wood stock.

The information I get from S&K is the two thin layers of carbon make the Ultra Walnut stock comparable in strength and warp resistance to a multiple-laminated wood stock. And since two pieces of thin walnut in the higher grades cost less than one piece of thick walnut of equal quality, the price of an Ultra Walnut stock is less expensive than a one-piece stock of the same grade. Completely finished, drop-in stocks can be purchased direct from S&K, and it is offered as an option by the Remington Custom Shop on various centerfire big-game rifles, including the new 40-X Hunter.

There you have them, my thoughts on each of the many available options in riflestock materials.