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Thomas
In response to your questions

...any insight as to why a round-bodied 97 action was selected as opposed to the flat-bottomed 76 action?...costs?...rem 700-type accuracy?...scalability?

The reason the round receiver was chosen was to keep the costs down. In building a round receiver the raw materials are purchased very close to the final OD of the receiver. The outside of the receiver is turned a little oversize in one operation on the lathe and then finished in another operation on an OD grinding machine. These two operations are very simple and quick to do in production. In building the Winchester style receiver the raw materials are purchased rectangular and it takes many different operations to finish the outside of the receiver along with quite a bit of hand polishing. Even with South Dakota being one of the lowest paying states, there is a lot of labor that goes into just the outside of the receiver on a Win style, along with a much much larger pile of chips generated while machining them. The inside of the receivers on round and rectangular require roughly the same treatment therefore costs inside should be very similar. The big firearms manufacurers like Winchester start with forgings and require much less metal to be removed making them much faster to produce.

..did don actually design the 97 action or ugo gussalli?...

Neither...Honestly the action was designed by Winchester long ago. Pete Grisel refined it and added the novel bolt stop before Dakota arms came into being and I'm not sure if it was under Don's direction, somebody at Dakota put it on a mandrel and turned it round. Beretta didn't want it to look like a Dakota so they told us to make the tang look more like a Rem. We welded up the tang, reglassed the stock pattern and sent it back to them. The prototype went back and forth many times changing the style of floor metal...Beretta just had to have detachable magazines, so Don designed.......cough cough choke gaasssp..let me get a glass of water..........Ahhhh that's better. Ok ok so somebody from Dakota bought a spare detachable magazine for a Remington and held it up next to the round "Winchester" receiver we had. Looked like a pretty good fit. Someone at Remington must have been on the ball. Beretta disliked the Rem style mag release and insisted it look like the Argentine Mauser style. So, we ripped the mag box off rem's floorplate and welded it onto a custom Grisel style floorplate. After much deliberation about the increased costs of this style floor metal, and having us hook the stock grip more like a Biesen stock than I origionally shaped they had the MATO.

...just a few more questions, if you don't mind...why walther lothar barrels as opposed to dakota barrels?...are the lothar's special dakota-spec'ed barrels?...

When I started at Dakota we were using Douglas barrels. They came to us rough turned and contoured. After enough customers complained about ripples in the barrel and gaps in the barrel channels Dakota decided to change vendors. Walther produced a very well polished, fairly ripple free, very consistant outside on their barrels for us to our print. The rifling in a Dakota Walther Barrel was nothing different than what Walther sold elsewhere while I worked there. It was the outside dimensions that make it an "exclusive Dakota barrel" I'll have to say Walther did a fantastic job making barrels that dropped in our barrel channel inlet straight off the CNC stock machine. It really saved time and a ton of glass in the stock shop. Chambering on the stainless ones are much more prone to chattering. It's not the same 400 series steel that American makers use. The inside of the Walther barrels I've looked at with a bore scope look VERY good though.

Everything you have read in the magazines about Dakota Arms might not have been true. In some cases you can't blame the writers, because they are supplied info from someone with their own agenda. Kind of like trusting the liberal media to tell you the truth on the evening news!

gunmaker