I bought a used 95 yr old shotgun from an auction that was in pretty bad shape. Nothing catastrophic, but needed some help. One of the issues, was a crack in the forend. As a woodworker I thought “I can fix this!” I knew that if worse came to worse I could put a dowel or brass rod across the whole thing. I had seen others do that, but it always looks bad. I also knew that the wood on old gun likely is pretty well soaked with gun oil and that ordinary wood glue will not be able to stick to the wood well enough to hold the crack together.
It’s hard to see in this photo, but the crack runs right down through the middle of a screw hole. This crack may have been caused by the screw or at least exacerbated by it.
On this side you can see the visible side of the crack. It is about 2 inches long.
Mark Novak is a Youtube gunsmith who has some fantastic videos on restoration and repair work that he does. One technique I have seen him use is what he calls the “dogbone repair.” He takes a small bolt and nut that resembles a dog bone. Then he cuts a space for the dog bone to fit into. He fills it with black epoxy and pushes the dogbone down into it. The dogbone provides the strength to keep the two sides of the crack pulled together.
Here is the nut and bolt sitting where before the opening is mortised.
I used two different rotary tool bits to cut the wood and make a capital H shaped mortise.
Unfortunately I didn’t get a photo of the H shaped mortise that I cut into the end grain of the forend. It has to be deeper than the nut and bolt so that it can fully submerge into the mortise.
I threw some painters tape on to prevent epoxy from getting everywhere.
Epoxy has the ability to get everywhere you don’t want it. I mixed some 5 minute epoxy with some mars black pigment. Then I filled the H-shaped hole that I had cut and pushed the bolt & nut into it. I squeezed and released the pressure on the crack several times to work the epoxy into the crack. Then I pushed the nut and bolt into the epoxy until it was completely covered by the epoxy. Then I tightened the vise to clamp the crack together.
I scraped away the extra epoxy, then left it alone to cure.
By morning the epoxy was fully cured and I took the forend out of the vise. I removed the tape and then used a sharp chisel to cut away any epoxy blobs that existed where they didn’t belong.
The crack is minimally visible thanks to the color. Black epoxy hides itself better than trying to match the epoxy to the brown wood color.
From a distance, the crack is barely visible, the repair hardware is not visible at all, and it is plenty strong to stand up to repeated firing of a 12 ga shotgun.
This repair is plenty strong and ready for repeated shots.
