May 1- Almost done!!!

May 1 – Almost done!

So the Remington 700 project has taken on two pathways to the finish line.  Since your author screwed up on the drilling of the scope mounts, I’ve had to wait for new base screws to arrive from MidwayUSA.  Well…they showed up last night!

While I was patiently waiting I went ahead and worked on the final finish and fitting of the stock.  After numerous sessions of “sanding in” the linseed oil, followed by multiple applications of polyurethane we have the finished stock!  (less the checkering on the grip and fore end….that will come later.)  Just for you purists out there….I still need to bore in the sling studs too….those are still to arrive, but that is a fairly easy process.

So here is the rifle with everything attached:

 Hey!  It looks like a rifle!....Notice how the grain of the walnut has a deep finish?

Now…to back up a bit...

The first thing I had to do was enlarge the screw holes on the front of the receiver to accept the larger screws.  Just drilling them out wouldn’t help much for a screw,…they needed to be taped…that is; screw threads needed to be installed in the holes.

This little device cuts matching screw holes into the bored out holes:

Now to place the bases on the receiver and line everything up:

Ok…now that the bases and rings are installed its time to install the actual scope.  To do this we need to make sure that everything is level.  Making sure the scope to the rifle is level is critical to making sure the scope actually points to the target and has the same relation as the rile.  For this little operation we need a series of levels.  Wheeler Engineering makes these nifty scope levels as seen here:

So…now we have the scope attached, but is it lined up perfectly?  Short answer is no.  For final alignment we’ll need to throw lead down range and adjust the scope to the bullet impact.  What I don’t want to do is shoot bullets that don’t even hit the paper target and be forced to guess how to make corrections.  What I want to is to be assured before I ever leave for the range that my rifle is “on paper”.  For that I need one of these little babies:

This is a Boresighter…that silver stick thing goes in the muzzle of the rifle and expands to form a solid fit.  Then that cone shaped device points back directly at the scope.  Looking through the scope (on low power) I can now see a little graph.  By adjusting the cross hairs so that they are centered on the graph I can be assured that the scope is set to at least hit on paper at a hundred yards.  Once I shoot three rounds and see where they impact I can make fine adjustments to move the grouping to the center of the target.

So…now the next step is to install the sling studs when they arrive and then begin the slow tedious process of checkering the stock….hopefully I’ll get a day in there to take it to the range and actually see how she shoots!