You will recall that I bought an Remington SPR18 in .308 for my son to use at college, only to find out that the intergral scope rail was miscut so as to not allow near enough scope internal adjustment to obtain zero. Since the rifle is to be used in the January Alabama whitetail rut (latest whitetail rut in the country), sending it back to Remington was not an option.

So I had my gunsmith drill and tap a one-piece Weaver base right on top of the intergral scope rail. In order to do this, almost half the base is hanging out in mid air. The only problem with this is it makes the setup a little more fragile in the event of bad bumps and drops. Otherwise, it works fine. Below are some pictures:

Rifle laying on my pool table. The top rifle is a Mossberg SSI in 30-'06 (I think I said in original post I like to buy inexpensive rifles and make them shoot. If not, I'm saying it now)


IN the next two photos, you can see how far off the reciever the scope-base extends.




I can tell you the rifle is a shooter, holding consistant and HONEST 1.5" groups at the range with both UMC 150-grain FMJ factory loads, and 150-grain Speer Grand Slams in front of 46.5 grains of Varget, handloads. The only problem is the zero wandered about two inches after each cleaning (every five shots during break-in.) Even that is not a big problem in whitetail hunting.

One impressive thing is how non-fouling the rifle barrel is. I was using a mechanical (rather than chemical) cleaning system, and got very, very little copper fouling. This might have something to do with the hammer-forging of the barrel, but since this is my first experience with hammer forging, I don't know for sure. Maybe someone on here knows.


Another thing for anyone considering one of these rifles; the trigger is autrocious out of the box. My gunsmith was able to take out all the "false starts" with a file with no problem. It's still a little on the heavy side, but smoothe and crisp.

Overall, the rifle will work well for what it is intended for.

Nice conpromise.

That gun begs for false side plates :-)

Rich

My son's taking it hunting today on a green field near Union Springs, Alabama. Bucks are in full rut.

We'll see if it was a good investment or not!

Chrome lined bore.

That is a very cool solution. I am trying a little different approach to the same problem. I have put a BKL cantilever mount on mine. I hope this mount will hang tough with the recoil of a 30-06. Bkl mounts are very strong airgun mounts and it will be interesting to see if it will be successful on my SPR18.

Hey I forgot to ask what Weaver base that was. Do you remember the number off that? That looks great.

Actually, I don't know which base he put on there, and the gun is off in Auburn, Alabama being put to good (hopefully) use.

I looked at the BKL system and was afraid that recoil would make it move. But I could be wrong.

I am concerned about the recoil as well. If I notive movement, I think I will buy a scope stop from BKL. It is primarily for airgunners, but I bet if I mounted it on the 11m rail right over the "cutout" it would stop rearward movement. I will post results after I try it out.