Finished up the pad spacer. There was no crash and burn, but the UHMW plastic didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. Anyway, here's how it went.
Rough cut the spacer to shape with the scroll saw.
Then went to the belt sander to finish. There was a bit of additional shaping with a sanding drum in a drill press, but the plastic sized down pretty easily.
Which got it to here. Note the fine scratches.
Finer grades of wet/dry paper had virtually no success removing the scratches. ScotchBrite pads also didn't faze the scratches. I even tried flame polishing with a torch--that had some minor improvement. About here, I jumped on Google and found out just how difficult it is to achieve a good finish quality on Ultra High Molecular Weight (UHMW) plastic.
Installed, before the last finishing attempt. It works perfectly, so there's the upside.
As a last ditch effort, I installed a fresh cotton buff on the grinder and used a plastic buffing compound. It did work, but took substantial pressure to get the compound to cut. More likely what was happening was the surface was simply melting from the friction. This resulted in tolerance loss in areas affecting the fit. There's still some trace of the scratches, but it's definitely better.
Some varnish lifting at the edge of the stock. This was present before I fit the new spacer. The old white spacer hid this pretty well. The stock will probably be refinished in the future. Guess it's more of a base hit than a home run. I may revisit this again and make the spacer out of aluminum.
A few weeks ago, I noted that I had a Morgan adjustable recoil pad that was almost on size to fit my Sterling HR-81. We've covered fitting Morgan plates before, so I didn't take any pics of the minor fitting process. Here's a couple images I quickly took of the result.
Thanks for checking in. More soon.
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