Spent this snow day morning putting in some quality time on the southern mountain rifle. Man.... a solid 2.5 hours of slowly, deliberately working on getting all the hardware pinned to the stock. Whew... it was pretty draining. I felt like I've sat through the ACT twice back to back. The hardware when clamped on the stock has metal flanges that line up with pre-drilled holes in the stock. My job was to clamp the parts, then carefully drill the flanges through the pre-drilled hole to be able to gently insert pinning stock wire through the stock and metal flanges to hold it in place.


Trigger guard was first, then came the ramrod pipes and the barrel. It was slow and steady wins the race, for sure, but it all came together. I marked the flanges with everything clamped, then took the part out and completed drilling the hole to keep from wallowing out the hole in the stock. Here is a barrel underlug and I was testing the pinning stock through the hole before trying to assemble it.


Finally got it all drilled and wire cut and temporarily pinned together.



Still have to disassemble to finish the wood and metal parts, but I'm pretty happy how it all come together. When disassembled, i can shorten the pins to make them flush with the stock... but that's for another day. I'm going to sit back and enjoy some coffee for a while.

Looking good 👍🏻

Absolutely fascinating. I’ve really enjoyed following this build

Wow, nice! What grade of maple is that?

Its the standard grade Jim offers. I didn't want to spend the extra $ for the upgraded stock, being that this is my first build.

I took my Crockett 32 for a walk Saturday, not a squirrel in sight. Matter of fact I haven't seen one in the yard all weekend or here at work today. I think they're hibernating.