625 .45 Colt wood stocks - checkered or not?

[Poconnor]

I missed your original intent. If I wanted “fancy wood” stocks I would contact herrett’s and or Culina; plus call spegal and get on his list. I lucked into a nice set of Culina coke bottle grips for my 625. My 625 is a .45 ACP so recoil is not an issue. My solution to heavy recoiling guns is to limit the number of rounds fired in one session.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]106638[/ATTACH

[That Guy]

The stocks have arrived! That was surprisingly fast.

Out with the old (you can see where I've had to grind material away to make way for speed loaders - the tape on the back strap is unfortunately not visible from this angle though):



In with the new:



I'd say those look decent. The checkering is not very aggressive. The palm swell felt a bit odd at first, like it was trying to position my hand to a lower grip, but a proper high grip turned out to work just fine with these stocks. Trigger finger placement felt a bit better than with the old stocks. They also cleared my HKS speed loaders without issues (unlike the old stocks).

The timing kind of sucked for the required test firing though. I have been doing some (hand) sawing of wood and hammering of (large) nails, to the point I can definitely feel it in my hands. So I knew I wasn't going to get a great grip on the gun. Oh well, off to the range it is anyway!



With my reloads (250 grains at about 950ish fps), the gun would try to rotate in my hand regardless of the checkering. Using gloves fixed the issue, but I spent most of the time shooting with bare hands anyways. A hundred rounds of my reloads turned out to be just about enough shooting for one session, thank you very much... I also found in my ammo storage a partial box of Magtech cowboy action ammo (not pictured), as one might expect those had pretty much zero felt recoil. (Disgustingly filthy stuff though. I guess the manufacturer was going for an old school black powder vibe..? :P )

In the end, without comparing two stocks side by side, I don't know if the checkering made much difference or not. But it certainly looks nice. I think these stocks will do.