My next column in Sports Afield is about a Holland & Holland 500/450 Royal sidelock double. Will be out shortly.

The column after that will be about a custom Krag 6.5 that can be attributed to the Holland & Holland shop. The architecture and particularly the cheekpiece shaping is almost identical to the Sidelock Double. Out in early September.

Steve, do all of your rifles tend to have cheek pieces? I sometimes thing they are aesthetic than pragmatic, though most of my rifles have them also. I'm not sure my next ones will. I'm just curious about your feelings about their necessity (or not).

I love the shorter forearm. Rifles with forearms that are nearly 1/2 or ore of the barrel length seem odd to me.

I'm just finishing a Marlin M-94 straight grip with no cheekpiece. I've built a couple of ambidextrous single shots without cheekpieces to be shot by Right and left handers and a M-73 Winchester with one. They really have limited usefulness but offer an opportunity to add a lot of character to the gunstock. For most rifles they are traditional and look funny without.

A real sexy and traditional cheekpiece on a California percussion rifle I built in 1991. The serial number is my 40th birthday~~
BTW: The stockwood was a French blank from Tessier via Ed Shulin.

That's percussion cheek piece is a little too racy for me. The pinnacle of that sort of thing in my world is Samuel Hawken's pistol grip Hawken. That is about as far as I would want to take it.

But that's still a darn nice rifle!

That percussion piece was truly the "assault" weapon of its day.