Originally Posted by Mule Deer
Well, your assumptions from one advertisement in the Campfire Classifieds are a little too broad.

Dave Gentry was an excellent custom gunsmith who passed away 15 years ago at 62. He built my first custom rifle in 1991, a .280 Remington on a 700 action that weighed just under 7 pounds with a 23" Douglas #1 stainless barrel, which I used to take a bunch of game through the 1990s. He was one of the first such gunsmiths who built his own lay-up synthetic stocks, but by the time he did my .280 he'd started using some other makes, because so many had appeared during that era. The stock on mine was a Garrett Accur-Light, a Colorado company that disappeared during the 90s.

Basically he turned the action into a push-feed Model 70, installing one of his excellent M70-type 3-position safeties, along with a M70 type bolt stop. He also cut out the main tube of the bolt, and replaced it with an aluminum tube of equal diameter, and so well you couldn't tell, and machined some weight off the outside of the action. He replaced the factory trigger with a Timney, and the rifle would shoot its most accurate load, the 139-grain Hornady Spire Point Interlock with enough mil-surp H4831 to get around 3100 fps, into around half an inch.

But he also built much bigger rifles, and in fact was such a 98 Mauser nut that he also built sporter 98 actions from short-action up through the "magnum" actions that could handle the .416 Rigby and .505 Gibbs. He not only built rifles on 'em, but sold unmarked actions to more than one British company, which of course marked them with their name.

He also made muzzle brakes with the ports angled slightly forward, to keep blast away from the shooter as much as possible, which he called Quiet Brakes. They were only slightly quieter than "normal" brakes, so Dave also made a model with a sleeve around the brake, to push muzzle blast even further from the shooter. Eileen tested one rifle he built, a .416 Remington Magnum weighing around 10 pounds, to see how it felt to her. (This was years before she started getting recoil headaches.) She shot it once offhand, in the presence of Dave, me, and David Petzal, who happened to be visiting Montana at the time. She hit what she was aiming at, then turned around and when Gentry asked her how it felt, she said, "Huh?" (She had forgotten to put on muffs.) But the recoil was definitely lighter.

At that time Dave also employed both his sons part-time. The older was Dave Jr., at the time getting at least one degree in computer science at Montana State University, who started converting Dave Sr.'s machines to CNC. The younger was Dennis, at the time still in high school. (He also let me do some work with his machines, while we built another of my rifles together, a .30-06 on an FN military action. He even offered me a job in the shop, but by that time I was making more writing than he could pay.)

Eventually Dave Jr. found a better-paying job, but Dennis really liked gunsmithing, and is now making the rifles. From everything I have heard they are very good, but am going to be visiting him soon for a magazine assignment, and test at least one of his rifles. Since he learned from a real master, and has been making rifles full-time for a while now, I don't expect to be disappointed.

John,

The first piece of yours that I read featured that 280. It was a write about lightweight rifles in the Wolfe seasonal (?) magazine Hunting Horizons (?). I still have it and a number of others as it was a great magazine.

Conduct is the best proof of character.