I should have mentioned that my other purpose in designing the .505 SRE was to provide a low cost sturdy reliable alternative to the custom rifles built on Brevex actions, which were then the only available Magnum action large enough to accept the .505 Gibbs. By using a P-14 Enfield action, a barrel by Buhmiller and a stock by Reinhardt Fajan I was able to do this and produce a rifle which I carried through a total of eleven weeks on safari in Kenya and Tanzania. I don't have the exact figures, but I can be fairly confident that my total outlay for the rifle was less than $750, including the custom reamer and the loading equipment.

This was a time when Kynoch was no longer producing ammunition for the classic African calibers and no alternative was in sight. The .505 Gibbs was a proprietary cartridge, and no components for loading it were available from Gibbs. .505 bullets were available from Barnes, but they were being formed from .045" thick copper plumbing tubing and as solids were hopeless. I ended up swaging Kynoch 570 grain .510" bullets made for the .500NE down to .505". (I later discovered that the swaging was unnecessary, since the chamber had enough neck clearance to allow the use of unaltered .510" bullets with impunity.)

The only other cartridge experimenter I was aware of to develop a cartridge and then personally try it out on African game was John Buhmiller, and I was proud to emulate him.