Had checkered and uncheckered rifles and never found any difference in the grip as I dont suffer from sweaty hands even in the hottest climates so that was/is reaon one. reason two is that I had a try at checkering and found it was one of those things that I had trouble getting done accurately and there is nothing worse than bad checkering to make a rifle look shabby and reason three is that of time/cost as thetime/cost I was quoted to get checkering done was high enough to cause me to decide that it offered nothing to the rifle except for the visual so I was content to forgoe the need for it and reason four was the few rifles I had seen with damage to the checkering that detracted from the desire to get it done. The greatly reduced hardiness of the checkered wood takes damage that is hardly noticable on the uncheckered wood, with the uncheckered wood being a great deal easier to "fix" than the checkered variety.
A good example of that was the skeletonised butt plate I did for my 7x57. I lent the rifle to a friend for a hunt and he muct have used it as a walking stick as there were gouges in the wood inside the butt plate so I had to set the butt plate a fraction deeper to refinish the wood sufficient to remove the gouges. Imagne if it was checkered, and that had to be redone as well.
I made a swuede leather cover for it and that relieved my concern for it in the hunting situation and gave more grip on the shoulder than any checkering may have done.
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