This months guest post is again from Cruffler, the same home gunsmith that built the M-16A1 and the Custom Mauser Sporter.
I have a soft spot in my heart for the Remington Rolling Block, and the one he built is beautiful.
The remaining words in this post are his:
When received, the rifle looked like the one at the top of Chuck Hawk’s page talking about the Swedish 8X58RD rolling block rifles.
I actually bought it from KebcoLLC, who doesn’t seem to have them in stock anymore. He used to have quite a good selection of Swedish Mauser, Lahti, and rolling block parts, but no more.
The original stock set:
I ordered a factory second stock set and butt plate from Treebone Carving for $134. The wood grain was pretty good, with just a few small checks or pinholes on one side of the butt stock which were filled nicely when finished.
The factory inletting and shaping on the stock and forend was very good. It took very little effort to inlet and finish the stock. I kept the original barrel, and had to do some inletting on the rear of the forend for the octagonal part of the barrel (forend was inlet for a round barrel). Just let Treebone Carving know that the stock is for a Swedish rolling block. There are some pictures of unfinished stocks on their website.
That being said, stock inletting for a rolling block is different than for a bolt action. The way I did it was I free-floated the rear of the forend from the front of the action. Then I made sure that the ends of the receiver tangs were free-floated from the wood too. I made sure that the butt stock wood was bearing only against the rear of the receiver. I used a bit of acraglas (well, maybe more than a bit on the forend!!) to complete the bedding and it worked out well. No stock splits with mostly mild cast bullet loads and a few full-power jacketed loads. I can post some pictures of the bedding points and inside of the forend if you want.
The rear sight, sling swivel, and the ramp front sight were soldered on, so I removed them by heating up the barrel. I removed the solder with a combination of light filing and sandpaper.
The owner of KebcoLLC found an original rear sight for me on one his trips to Sweden, and I replaced the crude sporter rear sight with that one.
I replaced the front ramp sight with a windage-adjustable globe front sight from Jeff's Outfitters.
The rifle happened to still have some nice case hardening colors on the receiver, so it was left alone and the barrel was blued using the slow rust blue method.
