THE HANDLOADING BENCH 6mm NORMA BENCH REST (Part 6)
behaviour under recoil. Strange! Like most sporting rifle stocks, the VS’s H-S Precision design is far from ideal for rest and bag shooting but should have coped with this mild recoiling cartridge.
The problems stemmed from the heavy-profile 28 inch barrel making the rifle unbalanced - far too much weight up front and the light synthetic stock with its hollow buttstock unable to counter it. The effects were exacerbated by the short fore-end placing the fulcrum of this particular pendulum too far back with lots of barrel ahead of the front-rest. I also used an ‘all-purpose’ rest-top and a thin leather bag on my Sinclair front-rest, a clever device that copes with a large variety of sporting rifle forend configurations and widths through a flexible bag and sliding sideplates.
However, no matter how carefully I adjusted the bag fit and side pressure, lubricated the bag with talcum powder or bag wax, the forend would stick giving a jerky recoil movement. The answer had to be a fixed-width rest-top, Cordura bag and matching stock changes. After considering cheapskate modifications such as a Delrin bag-riding plate bolted onto the forend and a lump of lead stuffed up the buttstock, I decided I had to bite the bullet again and fork out for a new stock optimised for this form of shooting - long
Putting a fat barrel into a Remy VS or PSS stock usually requires a bedding job.
with their raised and adjustable butt-combs and adjustable buttplate assemblies, northern gunsmith Pete Walker (Walker Rifles, http://www.walkerrifles.
co.uk) recommended the Shehane Tracker benchrest type stock, which as the name suggests is a very stable design that tracks superbly on the rest and rear bag. Unlike most prone-rifle stocks, the comb is low and no cheek contact is used – a policy that I’ve since continued with my F/TR rifles and wouldn’t depart from now. With the mild 6BR in a heavy rifle (22lb allowed in F Class, 17lb as a bench rest ‘Light Gun’), I fire the rig ‘free recoil’, shoulder just off the butt and
and heavy enough to balance the barrel. (If faced with this dilemma now, one of the wide-set bi-pods since developed for F/TR - such as the Fito Big-Foot and Dolphin Tracker - might work with the mild 6BR cartridge, if combined with a hefty lump of lead in the buttstock.)
Shehane Tracker
While expectations of what stocks should look like in this discipline have produced designs like the McMillan F Class and Robertson Composites models
the only body-to-rifle contact the forefinger caressing the 2oz trigger.
Fitting the rifle into this stock - which came in an alleged ‘semi-inletted’ form - was no simple job and Pete thought about the ideal action position long and hard before he drilled the holes for the stock bolts and started cutting fibreglass. I had a stroke of luck – discussing the restocking job with Pete and Target Shooter’s editor Vince Bottomley, the latter mentioned he had a used Jewell 2oz bench rest trigger
66
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94