With age comes things that you may later look back on with great affection. With guns, there have been four of those occassions that I personally cherish deeply. It was my time spent with 4 folks: My Dad, Middelton Tompkins, Neal Johnson, and Bo Clerke.
All of these guys have/had the capacity to immediately silence a room when they spoke. All are/were mentors and I am forever in their debt. I say this as a preamble of the "why" behind all this.
My ol man's 34 year career in the Air Force began as an electronic tech working on radar dishes all over the world. From that came a natural magnatism for electrical things. Stereos, RC stuff, and HO scale train sets are what I grew up with. The stereo thing is something I also have a lot of fun with. I have scrimped and saved over my adult life to own a nice class A, all vac tube driven, home audio setup. Vinyl is one of my things....
If you get into this little hobby, before long the subject of stylus cartridges becomes relevant and it is as hotly debated as "best way to break in a barrel." One thing that seems to resonate with the crowd is the need to dampen the big word stuff: harmonic, distortion, resonation, etc.... A company in Germany manufactures a stylus that resides inside an English Walnut chassis. Pretty little thing with an even fancier $5,000.00 price tag.
-I don't have one of those. Owning one was an idea once, but I'm so tone deaf now from living in a machine shop that it'd be pretty silly anymore.
So, this would be what I'll call
"Marker number 1." Moving back a couple decades now to my introduction to the other three folks. For those who know who they are, the names command respect at the highest levels of organized competitive shooting. Palma, Fullbore, F Class, International Free Rifle, 300m CISM, and International smallbore. This is where my career in this game started.
Wood guns out shoot plastic ones. Mid, Neal, and Bo have all said this to me at some point.
That would be
Marker #2. In 2003 I was the team armorer for the US Palma Team. One of the rifles I built, the blue one on our web site and in my sig block, was done this way. -sorta. I gutted the inlet, took walnut shavings mixed with resin, and made cookie dough. I packed it in the stock, let it cure, then machined it for bedding. That rifle shot well enough (owned by a very dear friend, Charles Clark) to routinely hold 1/3rd MOA elevation at 1,000 yards using metalic iron sights. Maybe its all because of a Mark Chanlynn barrel. Obviously, Charles has a natural ability as well. Regardless, that bedding job I did certainly didn't hurt anything.
I've built rifles like this off/on several times over the years when a client is willing to give me a long leash. Sheri Gallagher, Middelton's daughter showed up late one afternoon 2 days before the 2003 Junior Olympic Tryouts. she was 19 and on fire that year. (she single handedly kicked the snot out of over 50 competitors representing their home countries later that summer during the individual portion of the Palma championships) Sheri had a beat up 2013 Anschutz someone had given her. A friend and I spent the entire night thrashing on that rifle to have it ready for her formal debut into smallbore. We handed it back to her still stinking of barely cured clear coat (she had a thing for purple
) David Johnson, the National Rifle Team Coach at the time, did the lot testing and the rifle printed a 9.8mm 50 shot string. FWIW, the hardest hitting smallbore gun I'd ever heard of was a Pat McMillan barreled Annie built by Karl Kenyon that shot a 9.6.
Sheri took a silver at her first ever SB match a few days later. Earned herself a full ride scholarship at the Universtity of Nebraska shooting under the guidance of Launi Meili. She later went to the AMU and later yet, became the first woman into the Army's Golden Knights. I've known her family since her and her sister Michelle were about about 9 or 10 running around rifle ranges in pig tails.
In each case these guns responded very favorably. This most recent rimfire project was yet another product of all this. The folks from Vudoo and I have a very good relationship. We do quite a bit of work together. When this opportunity rose, they were all for it.
So, we went for it. The client was skeptical. The first outing seemed to dampen his reluctance as I'm told he cleaned house on his peers at a local match. The icing on this cake is that he did it with a loaded magazine. That is near blasphemy in rimfire benchrest. The respectful nod there goes to two other folk, Mr. Mike Bush and my very good friend, Ken Frankel. Two extremely sharp individuals that I've come to respect deeply. I'm very fortunate to call them friends. It's not often you find a rimfire that'll run from a magazine and not chew up the driving bands on a bullet. That challenge is known to cause flyers in smallbore. -Why you never see it in Olympic stuff.
In conclusion:
Take all of this with salt. I have, nor offer, any conclusive supporting evidence that this wood thing
really works. It's just something I've done over the years off/on based on everything you just read. If nothing else, its a great way to generate a good debate at a shooting bench. That alone is worth it in my book cause if you can get into a competitor's head, they are thinking about you and not shooting.
C.
