The latest rifle I have put together is for my son Jacob I finished it about a month ago. I put together a rifle for myself two years ago.
Both rifles are TC Renegades. Mine is a single trigger and his is a double set trigger. Both guns are 50 caliber.
My rifle was a fun project but over the last two years I forgot a few important things. Putting a green mountain barrel on and a set of Lyman sights are not just drop in and bolt on. At least not for a renegade project.
I bought the barrel first. I love my renegade rifle, so I wanted to make one for my son. I heard that Green Mountain had stopped production of the Stainless Steel LRH. I called them and they had one 1" barrel left. I bought it right away, and started to look for other parts. I found the rest of the parts on Ebay. I found a stock, that had the furniture on it, but the lock was rusty on the inside. The tang also had a hole drilled for a peep sight but the threads were wrong. I decided to get another lock and tang.
After I found all the parts I needed I started to put it together. First the GM barrel is NOT a drop in barrel for a renegade. The under rib is longer on the GM. When you put the barrel in the stock the under rib hits the wood. So I had to file away a big piece of the wood as wide as the under rib to make it fit and look good. Next the barrel channel had to be opened up a bit to keep the barrel for spreading the barrel channel. I was afraid it would crack the stock.
After I got the barrel to fit, I put stock finish on the areas I had worked, and the next step was the sights. The Lyman front sight was way too tight to go in so I had to use a dove tail file to open it up the dovetail in the barrel just a pinch to get the front sight in. The rear sight was next. Lyman makes the 57SML to fit the Renegade but it does NOT fit well, or should I say at all. The first thing I did was drill and tap the tang. This was pretty straight forward, and not too hard. Next, I had to file down the inside of the rear sight base where it matches up with the wood. Also the tang is curved and the sight base is flat. I filed the sight base down where it would clear the stock. I took off a lot of metal doing this to get it to work. Then I made a shim to fit under the front hole between the tang and the front hole on the sight base. I made sure that the sight would move straight up and down by using the shim.
The next step was to install the Uncle Mikes sling swivels. The rear one in the wood was already drilled and installed. So all I had to do was the front one. Well this was not easy either.
The TC barrel is drilled and tapped for the thimbles. The under rib is only drilled on the TC. So the machine screw goes through the thimble, through the under rib and threads into the barrel.
The Green Mountain Barrel is different. The thimbles on the GM use short screws and thread only into the under rib. The Screw that comes with the Uncle Mikes is a long allen head screw to go into the barrel. There are only a couple of things a guy can do. You can thread the long screw the rest of the way and shorten it. Or use the original GM screw. To use the GM screw you have to drill down through the top of the swivel to allow a flat head screw driver to go down through the center of it instead of a allen wrench. I drilled the swivel, and put it on.
After I was done installing everything, and everything was just the way I wanted, I took everything back apart so I could lock tight everything down. While doing this the wood screw on the back of the rear sight stripped out. I put wood glue in the hole and drove 3 wooden matches into the hole. After the glue set I started to reinstall everything with Lock tight. I have found that when you shoot, all the screws loosen up on the barrel. I don't know if this is a stainless steel thing or if all the barrels do this. To keep problems from starting to crop up I use Blue locktight. We put a Pacmyar slip on recoil pad on the gun to tame the recoil.
We took the rifle out the next day and shot it.
We started out with 50 gr of select and a round ball. We got the sights on the paper at 50 yards. Jacob was the one to sight it in with the round balls. with a 1-28 twist the round balls don't shoot great.
After it was hitting close I switched to 100 gr of Pyrodex select RS, and a 410 gr 50 caliber Hornady great plains bullet. It took three shots for me to center the sights.once they were at center, I shot a quick 1" group at 50 yards. I thought it was ok for it being so dirty. I cleaned the gun and loaded it again. I set the rear sight the same setting as my gun for 300 yards. I thought what the heck everything is the same on both guns.
I held a little to the left for wind and the shot was sent. A second later (actually 0.759 seconds later) the bullet hit the steel target dead center. I cleaned it again and loaded it for Jacob. He took aim at what we call the iron buffalo, it is about 15"x15". 0.759 seconds later the bullet smacked home. He was lucky, the bullet hit about 6" farther to the right he was close to missing. He must not have held as far into the wind as I told him to. Even at that he is 12 so I think he did very well.
Both of these projects were a lot of fun. They were both expensive because of the barrels. If I had used a blued steel barrel they would have been much cheaper. I wanted a barrel that would be easier to clean and take care of. My rifle shoots 1 1/4" 100 yard groups constantly. While I have not had the time to shoot Jacob's rifle much I don't think it will be any different. My rifle is a great hunting out to 150 yards and target rifle out to 300. I am sure Jacob's rifle will also be a great rifle.
