Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Express Rifles and Big Bores Only The great 458 Winchester. Everyone should own one at least once

It was a cold & dreary day so I decided to go hang out in a friend's barn & do a little work on Ophelia while he worked on his sailboat. I cranked up some Van Morrison on the Bose SoundLink & started to try to figure some things out...



The first thing I did was drill some test holes in a piece of scrap pine & to find the right drill bit to countersink my Talley crossbolt heads:



In several online reviews I heard mixed stories about adding pillars to a Ruger M77 stock. Some people had a perfect fit while others complained that the pillars were too long & needed to be shortened. There must be some variance in stock sizes between specific models because a new recoil pad I ordered wasn't even close to a good fit. Both of my pillars were too long and I had to use a file to get them to the correct length. I was just dry fitting them & using a Sharpie to mark the area that was proud of the wood & needed to be removed:



I found some 4" (10cm) stainless bolts to strengthen the grip & used a bench grinder to remove as much of one of the heads as possible:



Pat used one of his really long bits to drill a pilot hole before switching to a larger bit that was still slightly smaller than the stainless bolt:



With a slightly smaller hole, the stainless threads were able to grip the wood enough to screw the bolt in from the base of the butt to behind the tang. The ground down Phillips head was countersunk into a slightly larger hole:



So now I have about half of the items that Sir Ron suggested I install back on page 182. Drilling the crossbolt holes will give me something to do later this week. So progress! I don't know if I'm doing everything right since I'm making this up as I go along but it's been fun getting it to all fit together tightly.