Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Combination Guns and Drillings Fit the claw mounts to my combo today!

I posted a little while back about the cape gun I picked up a few months ago and dropped off at a local gunsmith for some work. Well I picked it up yesterday. He did a great job of fixing the forearm which was in really rough shape. The stock refinish looks good, really evened out the color. Only thing I am disappointed with are a few areas where he over-sanded so the wood-metal finish isn't as crisp as I would like. It already has me looking at walnut blanks to remake the stock this winter. That will be a fun project...

So today I decided to mount the scope that I fixed up. I measured both sets of mounts that I had along with the rifle bases with calipers. Finally caught a decent break where I could use the front AKAH mount that already fit the existing scope holes along with the rear mount from the other set. It took me just over 4 hours but I am really happy with the result! I had to take around 0.020" from the inside claws of both mounts. This is a line-to-line fit with the gun bases, so this controls the side-to-side tightness of the bases. For the rear mount I pulled the slider from rear base and used a jeweler's file to cut the notches deeper in the rear mount. Once I was close I profiled the bottom of the slider to produce a tapered lock-up to pull the rear mount down. It is bank-vault tight! Bore sighting it at 100 meters I ended up only 4 clicks from middle on the scope windage, 12 clicks from middle on elevation! I could even remove the 4 click offset in windage since the rear mount is adjustable.

I need to repaint the scope rail as all the fitting on and off of the rear mount scratched off some paint from my previous respray. The front mount is tight but not bank-vault tight so I may get some shim stock and fix that. The 25-35 Win produces 7 ft-lbs of recoil so I am not too worried about it . The plan is to get to the range in the next few weeks and test the zero repeat-ability.