Finally I had time to visit my friend to see the Rodda I mentioned above. Fortunately he was willing to give it to me for a closer inspection for a few weeks. The rifle was actually much nicer than I remembered.

I reckon this is going to be a short post - I'm far from being any kind of web-wizard, and I've now been tangled in FTPs, SSHs, URLs etc. etc. for a few hours now...

It's 2:00 a.m. and I'll just send this...

I took some preliminary photos of the rifle. I made maybe fifteen or twenty 30-60kB images. I won't attach them here, but they SHOULD be in my "homepage".

So, if you are interested, please, visit the site to see the images and also read what I requested in the initial post of this thread. Mehul already told us that the Rodda records are not available. That's a pity, of course, but I'm positive that You guys can help me with this greatly. Every piece of information is welcome.

I'll post this to the IGC also as soon as I able to, but it is definitely not tonight.

I have some specific technical questions for You, but now its not time for them either... Well let's take that back... Here's the first one: What is the idea of stalking safeties that can be engaged into half-cocked hammers, but not into fully cocked. If You check out the last three pictures in the Page2 of the link above, You see what I mean. It is really so that safeties can be pushed forward when hammers are in the half cock position, but in that case the hammers cannot be fully cocked nor lowered to their forward position.

I've thought that the purpose of hammer intercepting stalking safeties is to enable carrying of a cocked hammer rifle while stalking. When the game is close, the safety slides could then silently be moved to fire position. This is obviously not true with this rifle. Only thing that I can figure out is that this system has something to do with the fact that the hammers in this rifle are not rebounding, and the sliding interceptors are used to secure the loading and unloading.

Regards,
Saku