Rimfire Benchrest by Carl Boswell. Old materials - new ideas!
Different Prototypes - a 3-Dimensional Mind Map
A few early prototypes
My second choice would be water resistant plywood. It´s glued together under high pressure and not affected much by humidity. You can find it in different colours and with different surface patterns. It´s easy to drill and saw and you can remove your pencil marks if you need to do corrections on your design. If it’s good for rifle stocks then equally it will be good for a rest!
And yes, there are many other good woods, very special ones but they don´t fit in with my prime purpose, cheap and simple.
Much of the product development was a matter of trial and error. One could say that I have been heating my house so far this winter, with prototypes that didn´t meet my expections. It´s difficult to stop for a minute and do some thinking when you enjoy working with your hands. Rushing into solutions often means that you are going to ruin an otherwise a good piece of work. I promise you I have done just that, lots of times. The next day I would start from scratch but maybe a little bit wiser!
Pictures in this article show some of the different designs and ideas that have occurred during his tour. Actually you can create a front rest in almost endless designs and using hundreds of different technical solutions, they are all equally good if it wasn´t for the one thing - MONEY.
Many times I lost track, I forgot what my aims were - cheap and simple but functional. This experiment is probably a never-ending story, right now it looks like the final design in this article, next summer it might look totally different. I need to shoot with it a lot more to dare to say how good it is, therefore I will send a couple of them around the world so some ‘big name’ shooters can
give some feedback. The Final Design
As you can see the final design has quite a large footprint on the bench, creating a stable platform suitable for both rimfire and air rifle benchrest. (Whether it would be suitable for centerfire would need further testing - as Jens shoots all three sports it could be something for the future?)
This is a fast rest, five centimeters of movement covers the whole rimfire benchrest target. You can adjust the speed by drilling the holes between the pivot and the crossline of the sandbag axis into different center to center lengths but this is something that will occur from the drawings and its not a issue, just a fact of trigonometry.
The final model is actually a combination of different materials. The bottom plate is made of a 30mm thick plate already covered by a very hard synthetic melamine surface. These are sold mainly to be used in kitchens and places where cleaning with wet towel is necessary. It´s stiff enough and pretty heavy. After
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