I am happy to be finished with this project and will be shipping this week to the stock maker.

The project started as a simple hunting rifle and has grown into a very custom rifle. A FN produced Mauser action was fit with two 6mm Remington rifle barrels, produced by Shilen. They were fit and chambered by Texas Custom Rifles. I then contoured the barrels, in identical form, to the customers specifications and design. I then fit and installed the banded rear sight base, sling swivel and front sight base. The recoil lug on both banded rear sight bases were TIG welded prior to permanent attachment to the barrel by using a fixture to guarantee identical placement. Every care was taken that both barrels be IDENTICAL as they will both be fit to the same stock. The rear sights were remachined as an option was not available for the banded rear sight that I or the customer liked. They are 1 standing, 1 folding, however the leaf is not currently installed. Both front and rear sight bases were given a "fingernail" treatment, which was new to me, but not all together unpleasing.

An Ed Lapour 3-pos safety was installed, along with an over sized Oberndorf styled bolt handle. Custom Talley scope bases were machined and installed. A Blackburn bottom metal and trigger were fit and installed.

The set leaves this week to be stocked by Jerry Fisher. I truly hope that my work is up to his expectations and scrutiny. I can tell you, as I surely do not have the skills of Weibe, Martini, Thompson, or Anderson, that I am nervous in shipping them. I have not created a work of this extent to date, nor have I collaborated with anyone of Mr. Fisher's caliber.

Without further blathering.....








I hope you enjoyed looking at them. I certainly enjoyed making them.

Oh, and to those who are concerned about machining a Shilen barrel, here are the range results with factory ammo at 100 yds.

Barrel 1 (I pulled one shot)


Barrel 2 (I again, pulled one shot)


It was 28 and driving RAIN, I actually laid in the back of my vehicle and shot out the back. The flyer in both groups was shot 5, which could have been a number things including not being able to feel my fingers.

Looking great Nathaniel!

Very nice; the target pics did not show up.
Why the two barrels? They look alike.

Well done!

Oh wow, what a rifle. I hope we get a chance to see the finished product.

Fantastic work! Thank you for sharing.


.

Very nice work. Assumption is the 2nd identical barrel affords the customer the ability to install the second barrel after the first has worn out.???

Thank you all for the compliments.

They are identical within a few thousandths. The customer was VERY keen to have them as close as I could make them. With Mr.Fisher stocking them, they need to be damn near perfect. Difficult to do on the old clapped out machinery I have.

capoward, you win the prize. You are the first to suspect the intentions of the gentleman who commissioned this project. I scoffed at the idea of him shooting out two 6mm barrels in his lifetime. He intends to have them bored out to 7mm once the 6mm bores are shot out.

quote:

Originally posted by Fal Grunt:
...He intends to have them bored out to 7mm once the 6mm bores are shot out.

6mm Rem to 7x57. I had the same conversion done to my grandson's rifle last year. Mike McCabe had to set the barrel back a skosh, but there is no noticeable gap in the barrel channel.

Metal work looks great. Nice work.

quote:

they need to be damn near perfect. Difficult to do on the old clapped out machinery I have.

Looking at your work - you're running that old clapped out machinery very nicely!

Without comment on the client's thought process at all, this concept is incomprehensible. . He, or she, must be very young. Two barrels is great; if they are in different calibers.

quote:

Originally posted by dpcd:
Without comment on the client's thought process at all, this concept is incomprehensible. . He, or she, must be very young. Two barrels is great; if they are in different calibers.

Unless of course you want two barrels in the same chambering so when you shoot one out you have another ready to install.

Young or old, seems like good planning on the part of a person who obviously plans to shoot that rifle a lot.

Nice work Nathaniel!

That's a lovely, lovely creation, and I really have fallen in love with the 6mm Rem.

I'd like to know what the twist rate is. (My 6mm, with a Schneider barrel built in the early 90s on a Mod. 98 action, is the old 1:12 twist of the .244 Rem. I wanted a walk-around varmint rifle optimized for light bullets.)

To me, the two-barrel thing sounds like it's a legacy rifle: "I'll shoot the dickens out of it and when I die my heir will have an opportunity to restore it to what it was."

I'm just a middle American who never had much money but I have been around rifles all my life. I cannot comprehend shooting out a barrel on a rifle of any caliber. I just can't imagine the ammunition cost to do it. Whatever it is I have never had it.

quote:

Originally posted by zimbabwe:
I'm just a middle American who never had much money but I have been around rifles all my life. I cannot comprehend shooting out a barrel on a rifle of any caliber. I just can't imagine the ammunition cost to do it. Whatever it is I have never had it.

Must not shoot P Dogs or target shoot or hand load

quote:

Originally posted by z1r:

quote:

Originally posted by dpcd:
Without comment on the client's thought process at all, this concept is incomprehensible. . He, or she, must be very young. Two barrels is great; if they are in different calibers.

Unless of course you want two barrels in the same chambering so when you shoot one out you have another ready to install.

Young or old, seems like good planning on the part of a person who obviously plans to shoot that rifle a lot.

Nice work Nathaniel!

Agreed, Sounds like a plan for a man that wants to keep the rifle for life and use it a lot.

Shoot the first barrel out and replace it with the second barrel. Send the first barrel out and have it re-bored while he's busy wearing out the second barrel. Repeat as necessary.

At some point you or the rifle will be too old and worn out to function anymore.

To me a Mauser of this configuration and quality, plus stockwork by Fisher, is the kind of rifle I'd want to shoot enough to wear out. Sounds fantastic! Looking forward to seeing it completed.

Well something tells me this will not be a safe queen. Nice to see someone who wants to shoot the day lights out of a custom instead of smoking cigars and drinking whiskey wandering how it shoots if it was not for fear of getting finger prints on it....

I am interested in seeing how it goes after the polish and blue.

The machining is very nice.

In the Navy and Marine Corps, we have a saying about women that are just attractive enough to only be attractive after being on the ship or in the war zone for 6 months. We call that BOAT HOT. (now that women have been serving on combatant ships since the early 1990's)

I would say that it is better than boat hot.

I do not know Fisher's time table to complete a stock for it, but I have been told I will see photo's of it once it has been stocked. I know there will be some engraving/carving done to the metal work as well.

I look forward to its completion as well!

You do beautiful work Nathaniel.

quote:

Originally posted by TC1:
You do beautiful work Nathaniel.

+1

quote:

Originally posted by Fal Grunt:
I do not know Fisher's time table to complete a stock for it, but I have been told I will see photo's of it once it has been stocked. I know there will be some engraving/carving done to the metal work as well.

I look forward to its completion as well!

Great work. Your client is a friend of mine. He will shoot it!

Mention of the 6mm Remington (.244 Remington) brought up a surge of memories. In the '60's, when I was still on active duty with the Marine Corps, one of my rifle team teammates came to me one day and asked if I would like to buy a Model 70 Winchester. I asked him what caliber, and he said, ".240 Page Super Pooper." I had read an article in Gun Digest by Warren Page about the caliber, so I at least knew what he was talking about, so I asked him, "How much." "$75.00," was the reply.

I had started out high power shooting with a converted Springfield, but had always wanted to graduate to a Model 70, so my thought was, "This might be the opportunity," and I agreed to the deal. The rifle turned out to be a nicely kept standard weight pre-64 Model 70 in .243 Winchester, which someone had rechambered. The barrel was marked ".240 PSP".

The rifle followed me around for several years before I ever took the time to shoot it. When I did, I mounted a Unertl 1" target scope on top and took it to a friend's range, which extended out to 300 meters. After sighting in at close range, I decided to try a group at 300 meters. The five shots went into 1.250". Needless to say, I did not convert the rifle to .308, as I had originally planned. Instead, it became the scourge of the local groundhog population.

The .240 PSP is essentially the 6mm Remington blown out to a steeper shoulder angle. Warren Page claimed great things for it as a long range big game rifle, but I never used it for anything but varmints. Aside from its improved chamber, its advantage over the standard .244 was that it used the same 10" twist as the .243, making it capable of using the heavier bullets required for a deer/antelope rifle. Remington essentially saw the error of their ways when they renamed the cartridge "6mm Remington" and changed the twist from 12" to 10" in their production rifles. but the damage was done, and the cartridge never achieved the popularity of the .243, which is a shame, because the old .244/6mm Remington has virtues all its own.