Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats Lightweight Hunter Build

I found myself in the market for a lightweight, general purpose hunting rifle. After some positive experiences with Winchester M70 Featherweights, I decided to build one into such a rifle. The donor action is a late 90’s Classic Stainless Featherweight chambered in .308 Winchester. I managed to find a used McMillan Edge stock with a blind magazine inlet and sporter barrel channel to house the action.

The first step was to cut the stock to my correct LOP, chip out the old bedding (acraglass) and begin bedding the barrel channel and recoil lug. I also chose to fill the checkering on the stock





All was well until I went to remove the action from the bedding. I had used some cut off action screws as locating pins to keep the action positioned properly in the stock while the bedding compound cured. While I remembered to wax the locating pins, i neglected to wax the inside of the pillars and didn’t think about the threads on the pins creating a mechanical lock with the inside of the pillar. Doh.






The cute little factory pillar decided to part ways with the lightweight edge filled McMillan.


Fortunately, I had a much more skookum Badger Ordnance pillar in the parts bin and set to work “inletting” the stock with the hand held Bridgeport.