It's been a long winter with quite a few hours spent in the workshop on this project. For those who are interested, here is an update. The rifle has been mainly completed. What remains to be done is to convert an old magazine to 5 shot capacity and to fit it to this particular rifle. This job will have to wait for rainy days, although the way our spring is developing, I may be spending more time in the workshop than I would normally expect.

After completeing the butt, I began to get impatient about doing the fore-end so I decided to hurry things up a little by re-using the original walnut fore-end as a temporary measure rather than spending some more time starting from zero on a piece of maple. This is where the story begins.

By scrolling up in the posts one can find pictures of the original wood work. Here are a few close-ups of what I started with.

And

So here it is with the recess for the volley sight filled-in

And an ebony forend tip installed

I now think that I may keep this fore-end permanently, for historical sentiment, since it has been part of this rifle for 120 years and the match of the walnut to the maple, although not perfect, is not bad.

Here are some pictures of the whole thing

And

And some close-ups

And

Thanks for looking. I hope that the pictures have been posted OK and that I did not bore you with too many of them