We’re finally ready to do our final assembly on this Traditions St. Louis Hawken Kit. We’ve got all of our parts treated, our stock is ready to go, and it’s time to see what it looks like all together!

With our hardware finished, we’re ready to move onto finishing out stock. In the previous parts of this series, we’ve done a lot to this stock to make it fit and feel right, but the stain and oiling is going to be the most dramatic change, so buckle up and let’s get to it.

Next on our list here is bluing the barrel, barrel rib, tang, and any other “white” iron pieces like screwheads. First though we are going to soak a cotton ball in some rubbing alcohol and wipe down all the pieces we want to blue. This is going to clean off any dust or dirt from the shop, but also remove any skin oils or other oils that may be on the parts to give us our best shot at an even blued finish.

When it comes to your stock finish, a lot of the process comes down to personal choice. For my kit, I’m going to do a little sanding, some whiskering, some scraping, and some burnishing. To start though, we’re going to get a nice even surface on the stock with some sandpaper.

We’re ready to add some “age” to our brass on the Traditions St. Louis Hawken Kit

Today we tackle the daunting task of sanding and filing our brass

We’re back in the shop after unboxing our kit and getting our tools around and today we’re going to get started with the initial assembly and dry fitting!

In this video, we walk you through all the tools you’ll need to build this kit. This video was made after the kit was finished so we could accurately show you all the tools used. The basic list provided by Traditions is enough to get started, but we found there are some more tools that can really help the building process of one of these kits.