[ithacaartist]

Nah , too late. I've already belt sanded one of them down to leave about 1/8" of the plastic still on top of the wood backer. I'll hold off on the other one until I get some pics of it to show how outrageously thick they start out, comparing them to an original, on edge. They are worth more to me as practice pieces for checkering than to go thru the auction drill from this end.

When the thickness of the plastic had been reduced, I'd successfully removed all the "stag" stuff, leaving a single, brown pinhole towards its bottom--this has about a 50/50 chance of being removed by the checkering process; maybe I can actually plan its layout to achieve this for certain. Also, when reduced, the plastic readily showed that it was no longer bonded totally to the wood. In the effort to separate the two layers for cleanup and re-bonding, I, of course, wound up breaking the old plastic into two pieces. Whatever adhesive it is is tenacious in whatever it is still holding together, and it is detectably, slightly rubbery and flexible, which makes it hard to remove from either surface once they are separated. I'm hoping that the inevitable hairlines will hide among the checkering pattern, but at any rate, they will be good for practice and, I hope, shooting.

Someone collects these things? I guess they have appreciators, after all. Who'd-a-thunk?