Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Custom Rifles & Wildcats 7x57R Lee project

Picked up a severely bubba'd and worn out No. 1 Mk. III* a while back and I'm in process of turning it into a nice 7x57R rifle. Rebarreled it and fitted it with some Boyds wood so far, still on the agenda is removing what's left of the charger bridge, fitting it with some sights, reshaping the wood (at a minimum I'm going to reprofile the grip and either slim up and shorten the forend or place do something a little european with it), bed the forend, and applying a finish to the wood and the metal. Headspaced off the shoulder to hopefully avoid the issues the Lees usually have with brass life.

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lot's of shank left so you can install it on another action. Good luck but there can be lots o frustrations with the old No. 1. Head separations at the top of the list.

A lot of the issues with head separation on those have to do with the looser chambers inherent to military 303 rifles. I headspaced this one off the shoulder like a regular 7x57 to avoid that issue.

Put a little more work into it today. Finished the reshaping on the buttstock, applied BLO, and shortened/crowned the barrel at 22.5 inches. Likely will end up having the metal ceracoated to a color similar to the suncorite the British used as there are a couple machine marks that didn't polish out on the barrel and will show up if blued. Have yet to decide how I'm doing the forend, whether schnabel, slimming like the Lee speed, or leaving it chunky and grafting another wood onto the tip. Shaping up well however.

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