[Jeff Higgins]

I'll be using the traditional aqua fortis solution to bring out the tiger striping in the maple. It is essentially an acid that "burns" the wood, so where it soaks in more it gets darker. The tiger striping is really just hard and soft spots in the wood, with the hard spots being more dense, so they soak up less solution. How dark it gets is entirely up to how much you apply, how long you leave it on before neutralizing it, and how many times you do it. It's very controllable that way. I'll just keep going until I like it.

As far as how long this has taken me to get this far, remember, I'm retired. And I live in the Pacific Northwest. It's been gray and rainy in the couple of weeks since I picked up the kit. I bet I'm approaching 100 hours into it already. I anticipate at least 100 more. The "hard" parts, the inletting and locating of the parts to the stock may be done, but that is really only the half of it. The final sanding and finishing of the stock, along with the sanding and polishing of all of the metalwork, will be very time consuming. Just not as nerve wracking and fraught with hazard as taking chisels to the wood to inlet everything. While I'm definitely "out of the woods", there is still an awful lot to do.