So on the second day in Kuortane, I made some drastic changes to my cheekpiece, but noted that they only got me about 95% of the way to where I needed to be. The old design of cheekpiece just couldn’t adjust far enough to the left of the boreline to where I needed it. So, over the last few weeks, I sourced some wood (knife handle blanks made of african blackwood off ebay) and started to figure out how to use it as my new cheekpiece.
My first attempt was to take two of the m5 sleeves from the old cheekpiece and drill mounting holes for them in the new cheekpiece; that didn’t work so well as I didn’t have the right size bit and blackwood doesn’t exactly give a lot of leeway, the stuff is like polycarbonate, it’s so finegrained.
Next idea was to use T-nuts in place of the sleeves:
So it’s attached, it’s not exactly tidy as the T-nuts aren’t flush with the underneath of the cheekpiece, but who cares?
…and then I dropped my head into position behind the sights and the T-nuts pop right out.
Oh well. Idea #2; put the T-nuts on top of the cheekpiece and hold it together with longer bolts (thanks Matt!):
Even less tidy, but it was usable and I got a few shots off. I did have to redo the height of the raiser blocks to compensate for the new sights, but that and a few clicks to the right and I was back on target with only three adjustments:
However, by the next session, I’d gotten the drill bit I needed, so I redrilled the holes in the cheekpiece, refitted the sleeves and remounted the cheekpiece:
Nice. Tidier than the earlier tries, solid and stable, nice edge on the cheekpiece, and it comes far enough over to me to be a solution to the problems in Kuortane. However, I’m pausing the build for now at this point and just shooting; as well as hitting the gym a bit – turns out, weddings tend to add enough pounds to make a comfortable shooting suit into a straitjacket 😀
But at least, for now, FrankenRifle Lives!
