Originally Posted by SU35
Some of Allen's last word's doesn't sound like he's obsessed with rifles.


Well I don't just go on a mans last words, I took everything in the man said about his Legends over more than a decade.
His interest was in the absolute pinnacle of practical use hunting rifles; highest quality, attention to detail, reliability and perfomance,
hence why he contracted Echols to build them for him.

Originally Posted by SamOlson
I always thought AD was mostly obsessed with perfect function.


AD went through a wide spectrum of details about his Echols builds, and he praised & valued much more than just the tools function.



03/09/07 [quote=allenday]
Brad, first of all, I'd like to thank you very much for posting these photos, especially here on the 'Hunting Rifles' forum, as this gun was built to hunt with and not sit in the safe.

This rifle is an Echols 'Legend' in 270 Win., and it's built on a pre-64 Model 70 action in the 200,000 serial number range. A pre-64 action is optimal in this case as it has the very best magazine system
Winchester ever built for the 30-06 family of cartridges, and the receiver's just a trifle shorter than the Model 70 'Classic' action. So it's a very efficient action for a 270 Win., plus, you don't have to
replace the magazine box, follower, follower spring, or extractor. All of those parts are as good as they get already, and cannot really be improved upon.

The receiver was fully blueprinted, inside and out, top and bottom, to absolute concentricity, including the receiver face and bolt face, plus the lug-seats were remachined and then hand-lapped to full contact.
The tang was reshaped to more of a streamlined pre-war Model 70 configuration, improving appearance as well as getting rid of unnecessary metal, thus weight. The original scopemount screw holes were
redrilled and opened up to 8X40, which allows the holes to be drilled in a dead-line with the center of the receiver, and thus the rifle bore. Everything was then stoned and polished to absolute smoothness.
The round sections contain no flat spots, and the flat sections are dead-flat, with no ripples or dishes. One of the main reasons that D'Arcy remachines the bottom of the receiver is to create an absolutely flat,
concentric, and stress-free bedding platform, which contributes significantly to top accuracy and stability.

The bolt and trigger have had many of the parts upgraded, including a new firing pin, since the original was found to be undersized, plus new pins and springs, etc. The trigger and safety were perfectly timed
to work together as a true unit, and cocking-piece protrustion (runout) is perfectly consistent as the safety is engaged and disengaged. In other words, the cocking-piece meets the sear in exactly the same
place every time, resulting in an absolutely consistent and crisp trigger-pull everytime of 3.25 pounds. No creep, no safety jar-offs, and no slam-fires.

The bolt has been given a new, more modern, streamlined bolt handle by Tom Burgess that is compact, lighter, and set lower, so it better clears a modern low-mounted scope, and the bolt knob
was hand-checkered in two panels.

Triggerguard/floorplate assembly is built from scratch, of milled-steel construction, by Tom Burgess, and by the way, as I understand it D'Arcy has completed making the necessary jigs and is now making
his own milled-steel unit of a similar pattern in-house, at his own shop in Utah.

The bolt-release was also built-up and hand-checkered by Tom Burgess.

Scopemounts were totally designed from the ground up and built from scratch to exactly fit the receiver without a hairline gap showing (looks like one unit with the receiver, as if the two were grafted together),
of milled-steel construction, by D'Arcy Echols, in-house. The lower ring halves and bases are a single unit, and there are four 8x40 torx screws securing the top ring halves to the bases. The scope rings are
perfectly sized inside to exactly match the diameter of the scope tube. There is no flexing whatsoever when the rings are tightened up, and you can remove the scope and not detect that the scope was ever
mounted into a set of rings. With the scopes windage adjustment field counted back to the very middle of the adjustment range, the scope is only a couple of clicks off from perfect zero for windage, which
goes a long way to ensure against bullet-placement problems downrange due to parallax issues.

Original factory action screws were replaced with custom heat-treated hex-head action screws that were fabricated by Montana's Half-Moon Rifle shop. These are the toughest, most precise, best-built,
best-looking, and best-finished aftermarket Model 70 actions screws ever made, and D'Arcy doesn't use anything else. They don't bugger up, they don't slip, and they stay tight.

The barrel is a 22" cryogenically-treated Kreiger of Kreiger's 'Featherweight' contour, 1-10" twist; with all chambering (middle of SAAMI specs), crowning, finish, and installation by Echols. D'Arcy pays particular
attention to throat and lead dimensions, finding that these play a very big role in accuracy. There isn't a ripple to be found in this barrel anywhere, from shank to crown, and fortunately, this barrel just doesn't
foul up much, either.

The stock is D'Arcy's own McMillan that's been bedded in Devcon (I think!) and machined aluminum pillars in a stress-free manner, along with a medium-size red Pachmayr 'Decelerator' pad.

He originally crafted a pattern stock by hand, of his own unique trademark design, then hand-checkered it. It was then sent to McMillan for duplication into fiberglass. Echols uses these on every 'Legend' rifle
he builds, and he will sell these as blanks directly to the customer in either standard-pour, magnum-pour, or McMillan's 'Edge'. You can only buy these stocks directly from D'Arcy, when he has them and can ge
t them, and only for pre and post-64 Model 70s, although from what I understand they'll also work with a Montana Rifle Company action.

The one on this rifle a standard-pour, and brings total rifle weight to 8 lbs. complete.

Accuracy with my own 130 gr. Nosler Partition handloads is under 1/2" at 100 yards, and D'Arcy tells me it's an absolute drill with 130 gr. Barnes TSXs as well.

With all of these rifles, D'Arcy breaks the barrel in according to what is generally considered standard benchrest proceedure, then tests for accuracy with different loads. Feeding and function is thoroughly tested
as well. He won't send out an untested, unproven rifle ever -- it's not his way of doing things.

The red pad/brown stock idea was my own concept. A number of years ago, D'Arcy built for me a 338 Win. Mag. that I've used for a goodly amount of hunting. I didn't want another all-black rifle, so one night
I decided that a brown stock with a red pad would breath some visual life into a glass-stocked gun and harken back to an earlier era of custom riflemaking, plus it would contrast well with the blued metalwork,
and D'Arcy had that rifle on display at SCI one year. To my surprise, Echols tells me that this brown stock/red pad combo has become very popular with his clients.

Anyhow, that's the story of this 270, and now I'm going to take my wife out for the evening!

AD
[end/quote]

-Bulletproof and Waterproof don't mean Idiotproof.