Front Rest for benchrest shooting

[Jabawok]

I tackled this project to make myself a fully functioning front bench rest. Just would like to show my self styled and home made front bench rest to the forum. My criteria was to have full elevation and windage control for both left and right handed shooters, so I set out to find the best options.

At first I tried with a small hydraulic bottle jack that would have worked very well if I could get a 1 ton small one - the height was to much at the lowest position. Then an old looking and tiered old office chair with the old screw mechanism seemed to be a good starting point. I stripped it down to see how it works and then started adapting it to suite the purpose. After much trimming and shortening to what looked ridiculously low mechanism it finally started taking shape. OK elevation mechanism sorted, then how to manipulate it was next task. I found a go kart wheel in my garage that looked the part and fitted it to the adjustment hub. This also worked very well and started to take shape.

Next huge task was to create the actual rest with clamps and windage adjustment.After several prototypes out of sagex and ready rods I collected samples of bamboo we have in the office and started making the box with the slides and guide rods to allow for the windage. Next was the adjustment knobs and how to fit them - here I used old rollers from my stripped down printer and cut them to size and fixed them onto the ready rod with two nyloc nuts. Clamping mechanism took some working out to have versatility for my rifle and a full bench rest stock of 75 mm wide, eventually settled on a simple system of pushing a paddle with an adjusting bolt through the wall of the box, I had some nice soft leather so sewed a shaped tube to hold the sand for the actual part that the rifle rests on to give the best dead rest possible.

Altogether it seems to fit the part and actually works very well which beats just shooting of a sand bag. There are several tweaks I have made after these photies were taken and some interesting minor modifications made, especially the adjustable feet to work properly. The total realistic cost was about R 300.00 for all the stainless pin head bolts and other minor bits I had to buy. I did get some help from my mate Alan with the machining of the bolt and fixing plate and his really nice Bosch drill press for the parallel shaft guides needed for smooth windage, otherwise I used my DIY tools at home for all the work.

I have also made a cartridge tumbler out of a small HP printer which I will also post here if I can upload the videos to demonstrate how it works. Watch this space.

[Mackie]

Baie nice! Looking forward to the printer/tumbler