After getting the butt stock fitted it was time to do the forend. This was a special concern for this rifle. There seems to be consensus amongst people smarter than I that the recoil generated by big bore Marlins is just too much for the single screw banded style forend. I found tales of bent screws and split wood. I believed this since the big bores come from the factory with cap style forends rather than bands, and upon disassembly I found the single screw on my rifle had been bent by .30-30 recoil. The remedy was to fit a tenon in the barrel and shape the forend for a cap. I ordered the tenon and cap from Brownells.

Cutting a dovetail is simple and straight forward. The internet is full of helpful videos of how to do it. Regardless, hacking into a perfectly good barrel I just paid good money to have customized was scary! I used a dremel to buzz away the teeth from one side of a triangle file in order to make a safe side. After eyeballing it alot and thinking if over I decided upon a relatively short forend. It turned out it was to be centered on the half round groove the factory put there as a relief for the original forend screw to pass through. I marked out the length of the cut based on the width of the tenon and then filed until the depth down to that of the groove the factory put there. Here it is half way done.

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After getting the depth right I used the safe side file to relieve the sides, making sure the work progressed evenly on each side. Once the work progressed enough that the tenon went about half in I set it with a mallet and it was done. Relief!

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