Gunsmithing Manners stock need pillars?

Rerun7

Furious George
Full Member
Minuteman
  • Feb 18, 2017
    1,916
    2,135
    Fayetteville, Arkansas
    I'm ordering an Eh1 from manners for my tikka t3. I'm used to having pillars in all my stocks but the guy at manners said I don't need pillars for the Tikka.

    Wanted to get some additional opinions before pressing the go button. Is it ok not to run pillars in a carbon fiber stock for the tikka?
     
    I'd run pillars if it was me, but its hard to argue with a guy who makes the product for a living....
     
    I didn't order carbon, but a standard T4A for a Tikka CTR. I ordered it with pillars, but they took it off the order and said they didn't install them for the Tikka Stocks. I trust them.
     
    Pillars 101:

    This whole thing started a few decades ago when wood was more prevalent as a stock material. You snug up an action and over time the screws back out. Why? Wood is organic. It swells and shrinks with weather. Compound that with the level of vibration that takes place during a shot string and you end up with screws that misbehave by coming loose.

    The pillar idea came about as a means of mitigating this. With the mating parts now suspended from one another by a steel/AL column, the problem goes away. The nature of shooters is "more must be better" so the practice continued once synthetic stocks came into everyone's viewfinder.

    In today's stock making the composites have more than sufficient compression tolerance for 50 inch pounds spread over a broad surface area. (action/floor plate) The "carbon thing" is largely irrelevant. You could shell a stock in paper mache and it wouldn't make much difference in that context. Look at stuff closely once. Anywhere there is carbon, is by and large not contacting the action or related furniture in a relationship that would influence this in any appreciable way. It's all cut away. The shell is just that. A containment vessel shaped to be ergonomic and pleasing to the eye.

    It's primary job is to add stiffness and tolerance to recoil as it wanders its way back to your shoulder. The core of the stock is doing the work of transferring this energy to the shell. So long as the materials used have sufficient compression tolerance, it tolerates the loads put to it just fine.

    -That said we still use pillars on everything because the consumer expects it.

    It's not until you begin laying up much more complex mold/bladder structures that this changes a bit. You have to first divorce yourself from the conventional "hard boiled egg" rabbit hole to accomplish this. Not a cheap or easy venture.

    C.
     
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    I talked to the guy at manners again (who was great to work with btw) and told him that I'd like to add them if they can just for my piece of mind and if not then don't worry about it. I figure if I don't have them and feel the need later then it's not a big deal to install.