Length of pull, measured properly

Stocking is my trade: fitting the wood of a gun to the person who mounts it. It all starts with four measurements. This page explains them, gives the usual ranges, and offers a starting-point estimator. No online tool replaces a real gun mount: this one is here so you understand what you are measuring, and start from a sensible number instead of a habit.

Length of pull: middle of the trigger to the centre of the buttplate. Too short, your thumb rides back towards your nose and recoil bites; too long, the butt snags your clothing on the mount and your head creeps down the comb.

Drop: the vertical distance between the extended sight line and the top of the wood, taken at the comb and at the heel. Drop is what places your eye on the rib. Too much and the pattern goes low; too little and it goes high.

Cast: the sideways offset of the stock from the barrel plane, a few millimetres that bring the master eye onto the rib. Cast-off bends the stock away from a right-handed shooter's face; too little and the gun shoots left for a right-hander, too much and it shoots right. In French, cast is called avantage.

Pitch: the angle of the buttplate relative to the sight line. It spreads the pad's bearing across the shoulder pocket and affects felt recoil and how the gun stays put on driven birds.

Most online LOP calculators output a single figure from formulas that contradict one another and cite no source. I prefer an honest range: enter your measurement, get a starting point, check it against the usual ranges below, then validate it the only way that counts, by mounting the gun.

Two workshop rules of thumb to close: heavy winter clothing shortens the useful dimension by as much as it adds (allow ¼ to ⅜"), and when in doubt between two lengths, the shorter one can be managed in the mount, the too-long one cannot.

The most useful test needs only an unloaded gun and a mirror: mount with your eyes closed, then open them. Your eye should land naturally on the rib, and there should be one and a half to two and a half finger widths between the thumb of your trigger hand and your nose. Less, and the stock is short; more, and it is long.

The British tradition takes the logic to its end with the try-gun, a fitting gun with an articulated stock: length, drop, cast and pitch are adjusted on the shooting ground, then read off and cut into the wood. That is how the great houses do it, and it is the only method that measures the shooter in motion rather than at rest.

The trade has always drawn these dimensions before cutting them: early 20th century gunsmithing manuals plot drop at comb, drop at heel and length of pull exactly as we measure them today.

These four dimensions are the shared language between shooter and stockmaker: they are how a custom gun stock is ordered, cut and checked. On real stocking work they are everywhere: the swan-neck stock of my graduation Winchester M1885 was cut to them. And if you read French gun descriptions or auction listings, my French-English glossary of gun terms covers the whole vocabulary, from bascule to longuesse. And what comes after the dimensions is the business of the stock finish reference.