Dear Mr. Vicknair;
I wish you much success on this project; your finished work is very beautiful and your craftsmanship best quality. I have watched your work from a distance for a number of years and your skill and techniques are superb.
I started machining a new action body a few months ago to build another DR, and I believe that your estimate of total manhours of DR building is accurate. I complement you on using the sidelever along with a rising bite as the rising bite should work very smoothly with a side lever and make for a very strong breech section of the action. To my mind the use of a side lever will allow the design and building of a rising bite more simple and superior to the original design by Rigby.
The photo of the action you displayed shows very clean machining machining marks. Did you use manual vertical and or horizontal mills or do you have a high speed digital controlled machining center? I only have manual mills in my shop.
$50,000.00 just might cover shop overhead costs, but not contributing profit---a labor of love and investment in self education of best quality work.
On my next DR's I am going to build the barrels with shoe lumps. I have not done this before and am quite keen to do so. Have you used the shoe lump method to date?
Kindest Regards;
BV
Thanks very much.
The rising bite is actuated by the underbolt via a cam-link, so the choice of lever theoretically should have no impact on the mechanism's function.
My rising bite isn't a copy of Rigby's design in the way the underbolt and vertical bolt interact.
There is a drawing in Greener of the original Abbey-designed rising bite where the under and vertical bolts are both actuated (independently) by the underlever.
That design is indeed much simpler than either Rigby's or mine.
I also only have manual machinery. It took much more time to sort the design and geometry of the bolt mechanism than it did to machine the frame to this stage.
I'm familiar with shoe-lump construction but have never built barrels using it. Given the fact that there would be more brazing surface area than even chopper-lump barrels, I don't see any reason against its use.
