Dumb question alert:
How do you remove the bedded scope base and bedding material if you ever needed to?
Timbermaster;
Good afternoon to you sir, I hope the day down in your chunk of Montana is behaving and you're well.
With the understanding that I'm only a guy who fools with firearms as hobby/addiction and would recommend whatever Al says has been sound as far as my experience and understanding goes - here goes.
Most epoxies are not heat resistant and will degrade or fail above 275°F, though JB weld might need as much as 600°F so they seem to indicate. I've used a propane torch with a small tip as well as a heat gun and prefer the latter for sure. If one is concerned about overheating the metal, a heat gun is much harder to do that with and there are many decent infra red thermometers out there now for about $50 which will let us know the actual temperature of the metal.
Personally, I started using 5 minute epoxy on metal surfaces which did not precisely match - as Al has shown with his photos - in industrial woodworking applications and on our friends and families harder use firearms way back in the '90's. About that time in Peterson's Hunting, a writer who had guided in the Bob Marshall - Ed Nixon - outlined how he'd modified a "do all" BSA that he headed up to Alaska with in the late '50's. He wrote of using 5 minute epoxy for that purpose and that it worked for him.
We'd got into horses and hunting from them as well as had friends in far flung places who hunted from planes, quads and jetboats and as mentioned we were searching for a solution to having the bases loosen off. It made enough sense that I started experimenting with Ed Nixon's idea.
The method we've ended up currently using is that both surfaces are cleaned, then the epoxy is applied in such a way that it will not contact the retention screws. Great pain is taken to prevent that from happening, they're just there as indexing pins. Once the epoxy is cured, we'll test to make sure they can come out and then they're just tightened back up without a bonding agent.
None of the rifles which have that modification have loosened up afield in some regular and some fairly hard use across 3 western provinces and at least a couple in the Yukon too.
As always, my way isn't the only way and might not be the right way for anyone else either and that's an acceptable position to take.
Hope that made sense and was useful.
Dwayne
