Like I said earlier I was getting ahead of the story. I had to make the stock in order to be able to shoot and regulate the rifle. Regulating a double is a lot of fun, if you like shooting. It is challenging as it requires you to think in, well, sort of the abstract as things do not always seem as they are in reality.
One thing you must have is the ability to solve a puzzle. You have one wedge behind the frone sight, one further back and another which will end up you front swivel if all works out well. All this mess is held togther with hose clamps. Most of this I mentioned before however I left out the weird stuff!! For example, my rifle was crossing, meaning that the right barrel was hitting to the left of left barrel. One would assume that the solution would be to spread the muzzel of the rifle a bit. Moving the front wedge to the rear did little and it was then that out of desperation I tried driving the center wedge forward and solved the problem.
What was going on was that the center wedge was too far back and causing the barrels to cross as they were bowed.
Yes I could of driven the front wedge further to the rear and eventuially solved the problem but the idea is to get the barrels to shoot right with as little tention as possable. Tension trying to hold the barrels togther is not a problem but if there is tension trying to seperate them then there is the possibility of a joint failure. This would not be dangerous from a shooting perspective but from a charging buff aspect it would be very, very, bad!!!
Once the regulating was finally finished it was time to build the forearm. For the regulating I used the origional as I had it and did not want to make the new one until I knew where the barrels would end up in relation to the forearm hanger and the action. Making the forearm is the same process as the stock. You fit it to, in this case the forearm iron and then to the action and the barrels. with a classy job the ridge which meets the bottom ridge of the barrels will extend as far back as possable, all the way to the front of the forend iron. This is nor needed and is more a show of inletting but it does make for a tighter fit with less rocking then if this rib only extends for an inch or so. On my rifle it runs all the way mostly because I wanted to see if I could do it and get it right as I have been told it is a chalange. I did not find it too bad but it takes time and lots of fitting.