Guys,

This post is to explain an adventure in amateur smithing ... please don't assume I think it makes good sense to have done this work. It was fun, but not necessarily smart. Would have been more acute financially to have just bought Talley rings and bases. But being cheap, retired, and having six ring/base sets to replace ... I got silly.

As noted on the Big Bores forum, I have noted that the bars inside my Leuopld QRW mounts have been deforming under recoil with heavy kickers ... .376/.416 Steyr Improved (.416 Aagaard), and .458 AR. There are three kinds of bars in use on these mounts. The earliest is round ... I don't have any of those. The next mod is a short square bar, and the last one I am aware of is a square bar that goes all the way across the mount. I have seen distortion of both of these the short one distorting the most. Leupold has been nice about sending new parts.

BUT ... I think the mount needs a recoil shoulder that pushes against the ring itself.

I was very lucky and won the raffle for the "Last Ottmar Rifle." Mark Stratton did the scope mount bases for that rifle to fit Tally rings. They are simply lovely! Having Mark's book I looked at how he did things and decided that would fun to attempt something like them for Leupold QRW rings ... and that the recoil shoulder on his mounts would help the rings survive.

That being said, there are some huge differences between the Talley ring and any ring that can fit a Picattiny or Weaver rail ... the mounts can be made skinnier and as a result can look much more elegant. Mounts for a Weaver ring will not look as nice.

After cutting some 12L14 stock and squaring the ends, it became apparent that cold rolled material had to be checked for alignment every time it was vised up in the mill. (The blue "thingy" in the pics is an air-expansion jet cooler.)




The next step is to cut the curve in the front and rear bases. The cuts have different radii, so doing more than one at a time reduces the number of setups required for the boring head. A very good Narex bar with a carbide cutter is being used here:





I do not own a sine bar vise, so tried to make do with a Palmgren angle vise. I'd not do that again as the correspondence between the angle indicated on the vise and reality is pretty loose. Ended up doing significant filing to get the rear mounts to fit at the end.

The holes were drilled in the mounts and counterbored. Care was taken to get the holes on center line of each mount.

The milling operations required are not difficult but one has to make some choices as to what the reference for holding the action on a fixture will be. In the end, I decided to try using the outside scope mount holes as the means to determine the center. We'll see if that works when the rifle is fired for sight-in. The front block was use to assure that the action was in the vise flat across and side to side. I did this because the arc in the mount block fit the action perfectly.

Several operations were done with the blocks mounted on the action. The mounts were then cut to the same height, thinned to the right width with a 5/8" ball cutter, and the grooves were cut on both mounts.

The reliefs for the ring were then cut. The 45 degree angles were cut with the Palmgren angle vise and again had to be touched up with a file later. The tops ended up looking like this:



Before any additional sculpting with tapered mill cutters and rounding of corners the mounts look like this on a rifle:





Obviously pretty cobby just yet. Still substantial work left in getting things pretty and I don't think they can ever be as pretty as mounts made for Talley rings.

Things I leaned so far in this project:

1) A good smith EARNS way more than he's paid.

2) Every piece has to be checked for alignment every time it is put in a vise.

3) A sine bar is required to get angles perfect.

4) A lower mount will look better ... will try to do the next set (for a .458 AR) 0.100" lower than this pair.

5) More work needs to be done to "pretty them up" after they're functional.

6) Is a fun little project.

Will shoot the rifle tomorrow and let you know if they are actually close enough to work. That will be the real test ... and has the potential to be dissatisfying.


Added Monday 6/9/08

Second Mount Set

Made a second set of mounts for a Parker-Hale Mauser in .458 AR. I lowered the height of the mounts by 0.075" which puts them 0.050" higher than commercial mounts. Needed a little extra clearance around the bolt handle anyway.

Here are a couple of pics of that rifle with the new mounts holding a 1.8-5.5x Zeiss Conquest:





Again, the ends are not yet dressed nor are the sharp edges broken. The .458 AR mount has a 0.300 ledge beyond the back of the back ring. I'd like to use that space for a peep sight installation in the mount itself. Any ideas on design would be appreciated.

Range Check

Shot both rifles today. Used cast ammo because it tends to require more scope adjustment than normal ammo. The scopes on both rifles appear to have enough adjustment to bring the impact point to the place desired. I haven't yet found the center of the adjustment range to understand how much adjustment is left.

So far ... so good!

Mounts for .458 AR and initial range testing added above.

One thing I forgot to mention is that I am "scope poor," that is, I don't have enough scopes to have spares for a hunting trip. So one of the requirements of these mounts is that they are the same spacing on the rifles ... so scopes can be moved around without moving them in the rings. The mounts for the .376/.416 Steyr and the .458 AR present an identical platform for scopes to mount on. I've set three scopes and they all fit both rifles. Makes me happy!

Looks like a fun project Mike
jeffe

Beware a machinist with a warped imagination!

Very nice Mike, you want to make a set for my Ruger77 M2 500AccRel so I can use the Talley QD?

regards
S&F

S&F,

Sorry, don't have a Ruger 77 Mark2 to get the dimensions from and don't know how consistent they are. Also don't have a set of Talley rings to check fit against.

Thanks for the thought though

Mike, those mounts look very smart, you're lucky to have the skills to be able to do this, though I shudder to think of their value if you factored in the setting up time you must have taken, I bet it was very satisfying all the same.
I hope you won't mind if I ask, what safeties are those you have? Are they original PH ones? Thanks.
Steve.

Steve,

I love pretty rifles, but can only afford practical rifles ... and I don't feel bad about using them in poor weather conditions. I try to build with decent actions and put them in synthetic stocks. (Maybe someday I'll be able to afford doing nice stocks for a couple of them.) They are what I call "practical build" rifles.

The two rifles in the pics shown have FN Commercial Mauser safeties. They allow one to just raise the thumb to flick the safety off rather than have to move it to the other side of the action. Being an old IPSC shooter I like them fast.

The P-H originally had a sliding safety on the trigger. Trigger has been replaced with a Timney.

I did a mount set for another rifle today. This is the VZ.24 in 9,3x62 that was screwed up by the smith when he drilled the rear mount holes at an angle. Made the top of the commercial mount slope to the right side.

I made the rear block to fit the contour of the action. The holes in the block were drilled straight. This meant that the block was visibly canted to the right. BUT ... ... the block was oversized, and the excess was milled away in alignment with the front mount. Son of a gun ... I ended up with a pair of mounts that are straight! This set is also on the same spacing as the other two so I can share scopes.

I have two or three more sets to do. Then I'll horse with makin' them prettier and bluing them.

Thanks Mike, I'm with you on practical, pretty is nice but I tend to go for what works first & worry about the aesthetics when/if I can afford it. I suspect FN left hand safeties rate with rocking horse poo & hens teeth, not too common.
I like the idea though it would work for me.
Steve.

Mstarling,
If you get the urge to do this again try milling the Weaver rail profile on a long piece of bar stock. Then mill your radii on each end. Then slice off the parts you want to mount on the rifle and save the rest for the next project.
I salute your perseverance with the Palmgren vise. I worked in a shop with once of those a while. Later shops had Kurt vises. What a huge improvement.

ireload2,

The Palmgren was only used for cutting angles. Have a decent mill vise for everything else.

If one were making a long Weaver profile rail instead of one segment on each mount with recoil shoulders on both sides ... I'd agree with you. Doing what I'm doing is a PITA but is working.

I cut the front of a mount set to a 5 degree angle and the rear of each mount to a 2 1/2 degree angle. They look much nicer that simple vertical faces. Will post pics tomorrow.

Congrats on staying away from the TV and computer, and instead, making chips.
I find that building rifles pro bono is the way keep busy.

I think somewhere in Home Shop Machinist, Steve Acker has milled the bottom radius of scope mounts to fit with a fly cutter.



I have done it with a boring head, I have done it with a fly cutter, and I have done it with the nearest size end mill.

You put the block of Aluminum in the mill vice, but you will not be able to do that with existing Weaver rails. I ground down some V blocks for clearance, and put the Weaver in the V blocks and the V blocks in the vise.

Existing Weaver mounts are cheap and Anodized or blued already.
But if one wants to get 20 moa elevation or move the center over so that the first shot from a center adjusted scope will be on the paper, then the bottom of mount often needs to be cut and/or glassed.

Guys,

Decided to slant the ends of the mounts. Most I could get away with is 2 1/2 degrees on the front and 5 degrees on the back side of each mount.

Got two sets blued using Brownell's Dichropam IM. Haven't done this about 15 years (and that 1911 slide has held up very well) ... and have forgotten a lot about how to do it. Had some surface damage on flats that I don't like. I took the pieces to 400 grit and maybe I should have stopped at 320.

The rifles do sight-in and the scopes are interchangeable without moving rings.

Here is the 9,3x62 on a VZ.24 action. A "practical build" on a Fajen's synthetic stock:





Here is a .376/.416 Steyr Improved (.416 Aagaard). Another practical build with an FN commercial action on a Hogue stock:





Have mounts done for a .458 AR but the back end of the rear mount will have a peep sight built in as it is a DGR. Another 3 rifles (.270 Win, 264 Win Mag, and .338-06) to do so the scopes on them are available as spares for hunting trips.

Congrats! That's the first time I every saw a weaver mount that actually looked good. As for the Dichropam IM, I've had the best luck stopping at 220. But I've only done it a few times so take it for what it's worth.
-Don

Mike,

Those look very nice!

I still think you need to get a block of 4140 and carve away everything that doesn't look like a Mauser action.

Mike,

Great looking bases and thanks for the helpful information this afternoon.

Take care.
Matt

A great project. I've allways wanted the ability to do this. I would ask why the scopes have ended up so high?

I like'm

Terry

That's a pretty fancy bit of machining....good work!

Shane Thompson