I think I found my new favorite camo

[John A.]

Hello. My name is John, and I'm a camo junky.

As most of the guys here know, I've used a lot of camo's over the years.

Until now, I have always fell back on my old favorite. One that I've been using since the late 80's or real early 90's. The Natural Gear camo pattern. It has always done well in my woods in late season hunting.





And now that water immersion graphics are really coming into bloom, there are a lot of different patterns available out there that just a few years ago, were entirely impossible to produce.

But the newer high definition stuff is really changing things up.

About a year ago, I stumbled upon a camo offered by a small outfit in North Carolina that is named Strata. The best that I can tell, kind of reminds me of how the earth looks from a satellite view. Anyway, it blends in really well too, but I thought it was sort of "dark" from a lack of better explanation.



I've done a ton of older style mossy oaks and realtrees and I can't complain a lot about them either.







But the new pattern that I tried this week has left my mind blown. I mean, just almost speechless and not knowing what to say.

The pattern below is called Ston camo and is licensed by ShadowBrand. I'll just leave a few pictures up for you guys to see since a picture is worth 1000 words.

Here's a few closeup views of some of the parts before I clear coated them.





After clearcoated and assembled


And a few quick shots while we were squirrel hunting up at the cabin this weekend.







And yes, it is in the picture below too.

[RU Grendel]

That looks awesome. Where do you get the dip kits from?

[John A.]

I was an FFL/Gunsmith for about 10 years and I was licensed with most of the major makers at the time and the ston camo came from TWN, but they require user agreements and such. Not to mention having a minimum order amount. My buddy wanted me to do a black powder rifle and a 243 rifle for him, so the minimum order didn't bother me for this since I was going to need a couple of meters of film anyway.

As for the major places to get film and kits, there are liquid print, TWN, immersiongraphics.com and a few others.

And if you just want to get some of the hobby kits, you can find them on ebay, as well as several different ones online. Dip Wizard/Dip Demon, mydipkit and others.

It's not real hard to do the camo dips if you take your time and think things through and have the tanks and stuff to do it, but it is time consuming. Working by myself, I can do a gun in about 6-8 hours altogether not including dry time for the basecoat and the clearcoat that goes over top of it. Field stripping it down into their various parts takes about as long as dipping and rinsing everything off.

If all I had to do was spray and dip, wouldn't be hard at all, but you have to dip a lot of pieces and then put them all back together to get good coverage and do it right.