Hi Con,

Target weight of the gun without a scope and mounts is between 9.5-10 lbs (4,3 - 4,5 kg). It really doesn't matter if it goes all the way down to 9 lbs but this is the lower limit. If it weighs a bit more, it doesn't matter either. I'm more conserned about the balance of the gun as it should be heavy enough and yet it should be lively enough. I think that the standard weight of this bore is just this, so I really don't want it to be too heavy (.458 class).

As you can see from the picture, there is almost four inches of straigt bull barrel from the receiver and from there on, the the shape of the barrel is quite straight taper to the muzzle. This way the barrel is quite heavy, yet most of the weight is in the reciever end - resulting hopefully to a rifle that has a balance point between hands. It seems to me that with this action I can place a "kick-stop" to the stock as the action itself is a bit lighter than Mauser 98. Also the sights add a little weight to the front.

To me, it's nose heaviness that bothers me the most in some "safari-rifles" that I've tried. Rugers are a good example: .375 H&H is too nose heavy and .416 Rigby is just right. One should notise that barrel profile is the same in both and .375 is just heavier since it's barrel has smaller hole (more walls). I hope the rifle would be a bit nose heavy in the beginning as it would be a good thing if I could be able to weight the stock just a bit. Normally this isn't necessarily a good thing, but in this case I could also manipulate the top heaviness if i could attach the kick-stop to the bottom portion of the stock.

The actual measures for the barrel were not too exact as I improvised a bit during the process. Actually the bull part of the barrel is the same as the Douglas barrel blank (turned smooth of course). From there on there is a negative radius turn in two and one half inches to a diameter of one inch. Muzzle is 0.485" - if my metric conversions are there