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It might be of interest for me to recite the procedure I went through in building the rifle I killed most of my dangerous game in Africa with.

In 1968 I was a graduate student, subsisting on a National Defense Fellowship and the GI Bill. I already had a .458 Winchester Magnum, built on a double heat treated Springfield action, but somehow I wasn't satisfied with it. There was a line from Hemingway's "Short Happy Life of Francis McComber" which fascinated me. The professional hunter was armed with a "short, ugly, shockingly big-bored .505 Gibbs."

Building a .505 Gibbs made no sense at all in those days. Kynoch had stopped, or was about to stop manufacturing ammunition in African calibers, and in any case it was Berdan primed and unnecessarily large. I considered the .475 A&M as a possible alternative, but rejected it. Where to get the bullets and the long action it required?

A correspondence with John Buhmiller put me on the right track. John had experimented with the .460 Weatherby Magnum opened up to .500 and found it to be a killer in Africa. However, using it would require a long action, and I wasn't at all convinced that I needed that much case capacity to achieve .505 Gibbs performance. I decided to shorten the .460 case to 2.5", to allow it to be used in a standard action. I called my cartridge the .505 SRE (Short Range Express).

What standard action? P-14 Enfield actions were plentiful and cheap, and had a bolt face and extractor which required little modification for the .460 rim size. I located one and had it "sporterized" by removing the "ears", replacing the "dog leg" bolt handle with a straight one, a la Model 70 Winchester, and D&T for a receiver sight. I replaced the magazine with one from a Model 1917 Enfield. A Dayton-Traister trigger with cock on opening conversion completed the procedure.

Now I needed a barrel and a reamer. John Buhmiller supplied the barrel and Keith Francis the reamer. My design started out as a straight sided case, sort of a magnified .458, but I decided on a slight shoulder, to make it, I thought, feed better. The barrelled action was assembled and tested by the tried and true method of lashing it to a tire and firing with a lanyard. No problem.

To deal with the problem of bedding such a heavy recoil, an additional recoil lug was screwed and silver soldered to the barrel. In the interest of quick handling, the barrel length was set at 22". The rifle was fitted with a Lyman 48 rear sight and a Redfield Sourdough front sight in a Williams' ramp. The preferable Redfield banded ramp was not available for the diameter barrel I was using.

Now there was the problem of bullets. The .505 Gibbs was a propritary cartridge and Kynoch would not sell the bullets. The alternative was Barnes bullets, which used copper water pipe for jackets. John Buhmiller's comment was that "Barnes solids made good soft points."

I tested the cartridge with Barnes bullets. I had no trouble achieving .505 Gibbs performance with the much smaller case. Then I was able to locate a supply of Kynoch .500 Nitro Express .510" diameter 570 grain solids. As a precaution, I had them turned down to .505" for use in the rifle. They worked great, and I could duplicate .500 Nitro Express performance with 90 grains of 4064 in the smaller case even with my 22" barrel.

I had been shooting the rifle with a very crude Fajan stock. I decided something nicer was warranted, and sent the rifle to Fajan with orders to fit it to a "Classic" stock with "semi-fancy" wood. The resulting stock exceeded my expectations. The completed rifle weighed in at 8 3/4 pounds.

All in all, it cost less than $600.00.

I had about a year to practice with the rifle before I took it to Africa. Practice consisted largely of firing magazine after magazine full of reduced lead bullet loads at targets of opportunity (stumps, rocks) while wandering through the countryside. Full loads were only fired for sighting in purposes. The action was exceptionally smooth, and the more I shot it, the smoother it got. Cartridges fed through it flawlessly.

Finally, in 1971, I was off with it to Africa. A few shots over the hunting car hood, with a folded towel under my jacket for padding, confirmed the zero was unchanged. On the first trip I accounted for my first elephant and my rhino, plus an unsuspecting wildebeest I decided to test a Barnes 600 grain SP on. The animal went down with the shot, got up and staggered a few feet and collapsed. There was no exit wound, and only fragments of the bullet were located. The bullet had disintegrated on contact with the heavy shoulder bone.

My first elephant was shot using a brain shot from the side. The animal went down with the first shot and stayed down after I emptied my four shot magazine into him. The bullet from the first shot was found in his left eye socket on the far side, where it had traversed the entire skull virtually undamaged.

On the next trip I accounted for two more elephants, both brain shots, and four Cape buffalo, three of which were shot from straight ahead, right through the chest, all with Kynoch solids. On my last trip, one Cape buffalo, which I hit four times as he ran past me. Three of the shots could have been covered with a playing card and were right in the shoulder-heart-lung area. I never noticed recoil when shooting at any of these game animals.

Of course, prices have climbed since I built my rifle, but it is still possible to build a perfectly servicable dangerous game rifle on a modest budget. A couple of years ago I bought a crude but efective .458 Winchester Magnum built on a P-14 action for about $400 on one of the on line auctions. It now resides in my nephew's gun safe, and I hope he gets a chance to put it to good use.

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