No wood can match the beauty of fancy walnut, but from the practical standpoint it does not make the best rifle stocking medium.

I once owned a rifle where in the humid months of a Pennsylvania summer the barrel would be perfectly centered in its channel with 1/8-inch clearance all around, but in the dead of winter the stock would actually be touching the barrel on one side at the fore-end tip. That rifle went through that same cycle every year as long as I owned it.

Admittedly, that's an extreme example, but it's also the reason why so many production rifles today are set up at the factory with fully floating barrels. In my experience, soda straw barrels generally shoot tighter groups when there's some dampening pressure at the fore-end tip, but the warpage factor makes them more temperamental with regard to their ability to maintain zero. Sporter- and heavy-weight barrels tend to group and hold zero better when fully floated.

At about the same time that walnut was becoming scarce, the age of the fiberglass stock got its start. It was purely coincidental that at about the same time--the late 1960's and early '70s, the benchrest people began looking for a more stable stocking medium.

Some of that impetus was the result of another emerging concept: glass bedding. It was, I believe, the February 1957 issue of the American Rifleman that Brownell's Acraglas was first advertised. I was just a teenager at the time, but the idea that even a rank amateur could achieve perfect, 100 percent contact between wood and metal sure had me excited--enough so that upon acquiring my first bolt action centerfire rifle in the early 1960s, I immediately glass bedded it. And I've glass bedded every rifle since.

Stocks can be molded to very tight tolerances but are not thermally stable at temperature extremes. They are fine, however, within normal ranges.

As good an idea as glass bedding was, it didn't prevent a stock from warping. If glass bedding was good, wouldn't making the entire stock of fiberglass be even better?

Some of the pioneers in the field were Chet Brown, Lee Six and Gale McMillan, and it was in benchrest competition that the first generation of synthetic stocks appeared. The process consisted of taking sheets of fiberglass cloth, soaking them in epoxy, then laying the cloth in crude, half-shell molds.

Laminates raised eyebrows when made their big debut over 20 years ago, but those stocks were nothing compared to what's available today--this Boyds' Evolution on a customized Ruger 10/22, for instance.

The external shape barely resembled a gun stock, and the bedding surface was but a remote approximation of the required inletting. Finishing one of these early examples of after-market stocks was a real nightmare, and when you were finished with it, the stock still didn't possess the proper lines and detailing because the thinness of the fiberglass shell wouldn't allow any major reshaping.

It actually took a couple of decades for the process to be refined to where today laid-up fiberglass stocks can almost match the lines, contours, dimensions and detail that can be achieved by the finest wood craftsmen. McMillan, for example, offers dozens of styles that replicate the factory originals. The inletting is molded-in using nominally dimensioned slave forms precise enough to allow virtual drop-in compatibility.

Better yet, you can send your barreled action in and they will glass bed it in the stock of your choice. Several of the better companies specializing in laid-up stocks offer this type of service.