Posted on 12/19/2011 4:43:46 AM PST by marktwain
POLSON — It’s a highly specialized business, carving rifle and shotgun stocks out of blocks of walnut and maple and then custom-fitting them to each gun and gun owner.
Kelly Clairmont said there are maybe 100 people in the United States who do it for a living.
“And four of them are right here in Polson,” he said.
And all four of them got their starts with Bob James, a longtime custom stock maker in Polson. The others eventually formed their own company, S&S Plus, while Clairmont in 2009 bought out James’ business, which is now called Montana Custom Guns, after working for him for six years.
Both firms serve a niche market: Gun owners from across the nation who are willing to pay thousands of dollars to essentially have themselves form-fitted to the stocks of their shotguns and rifles.
“The majority of the work is with shotguns used for sporting clays,” Clairmont said. “Rifles, if they don’t have scopes, have two sights you line up, but shotguns only have one sight at the end of the barrel, so when you shoot a shotgun, your eye becomes your rear sight.”
And getting a gun owner’s eye centered exactly on the rib is what this business is all about.
Well, that, and beauty.
The woods used can turn this into an art form.
Walnuts are the most popular, and Clairmont makes stocks out of black walnut; claro walnut; Turkish, French or English walnut; and Royal Russian Circassian walnut.
They come in what are called “blanks,” blocks of wood to be carved down into the stocks.
You can get a blank for $90 or you can pay $2,800 or more for one, but few people who go to the expense of replacing an existing stock with a custom-fitted one opt for
(Excerpt) Read more at billingsgazette.com ...
IMHO, these stocks look like a great investment!
Yes, they are so is walnut which you can not use all of the wood which is why it is expensive.
They are.
Want to see some really nice rifles?
Look to Germany:
http://www.hartmannandweiss.com/de/repetierbuechsen.php
They were at the SCI show last year. No prices on any of their goods, and all the weapons were under glass, no handling allowed. Even H&H allowed people to examine their goods, but not H & W.
Australian Coachwood also can be beautiful...unfortunately I understand it’s not available over here.
I don’t know about the stocks being an investment. I think you’d do better buying a walnut tree and cutting it into blanks as an investment. The majority of the tree will turn into lower-to-middle end of the price range blanks, but even at $200 to $800, if sawn correctly, you can make quite a bit on trees out of California (for example).
The really “high figure” walnut pieces with high prices can wait for a long time for the right person with the right project to come along.
It helps if you’re somewhere where you can dry down the wood (eg, the high desert regions of the west), or you have a warehouse where you can dry the wood down. The blanks need to age for four to seven years before a stockmaker can use them. Bigger custom outfits like Dakota Arms in Sturgis, SD have huge racks of blanks sitting in their shop, ready to go. I’d put their inventory of blanks at between $500K and a mil - just sitting on racks, waiting for buyers to choose a blank. You’ve got to have enough money to buy all that wood and put it up on a shelf for years without any sales... and that’s what makes it a tough investment.
Buying live walnut trees in California, cutting them down and selling them to people who will put them into racks for aging... that gets you a return on your investment a tad faster.
And those are definitely not from $90 blanks
Quite right. The stock on the lower left and then like four stocks above that are both very high dollar, “high figure” walnut.
Blanks for a bolt gun with that kind of figure start at about $1500 and go up.
One of the great tragedys of the gun world was when a 24,000 square foot warehouse of stock blanks belonging to Pachmayr went up in flames.
Oooooooo. Very pretty. That stock has wonderful figure. Nice checkering, too.
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