February 2012 Issue - Target Shooter Magazine

Rimfire Benchrest by Carl Boswell.
Old materials - new ideas!
A few early prototypes
My second choice would be water resistant plywood.
It´s glued together under high pressure and not
affected much by humidity. You can find it in different
colours and with different surface patterns. It´s easy to
drill and saw and you can remove your pencil marks if
you need to do corrections on your design. If it’s good
for rifle stocks then equally it will be good for a rest!
And yes, there are many other good woods, very
special ones but they don´t fit in with my prime
purpose, cheap and simple.
This is a fast rest, five centimeters of movement
covers the whole rimfire benchrest target. You can
adjust the speed by drilling the holes between the
pivot and the crossline of the sandbag axis into
different center to center lengths but this is something
that will occur from the drawings and its not a issue,
just a fact of trigonometry.
Different Prototypes - a
3-Dimensional Mind Map
Much of the product development was a matter of
trial and error. One could say that I have been heating
my house so far this winter, with prototypes that
didn´t meet my expections. It´s difficult to stop for a
minute and do some thinking when you enjoy working
with your hands. Rushing into solutions often means
that you are going to ruin an otherwise a good piece
of work. I promise you I have done just that, lots of
times. The next day I would start from scratch but
maybe a little bit wiser!
Pictures in this article show some of the different
designs and ideas that have occurred during his tour.
Actually you can create a front rest in almost endless
designs and using hundreds of different technical
solutions, they are all equally good if it wasn´t for the
one thing - MONEY.
Many times I lost track, I forgot what my aims were -
cheap and simple but functional. This experiment is
probably a never-ending story, right now it looks like
the final design in this article, next summer it might
look totally different. I need to shoot with it a lot more
to dare to say how good it is, therefore I will send a
couple of them around the world so some ‘big name’
shooters can
give some feedback.
The Final Design
As you can see the final design has quite a large
footprint on the bench, creating a stable platform
suitable for both rimfire and air rifle benchrest.
(Whether it would be suitable for centerfire would
need further testing - as Jens shoots all three sports it
could be something for the future?)
The final model is actually a combination of different
materials. The bottom plate is made of a 30mm
thick plate already covered by a very hard synthetic
melamine surface. These are sold mainly to be used
in kitchens and places where cleaning with wet towel
is necessary. It´s stiff enough and pretty heavy. After
The upper plate, blue coloured, is standard plywood and
can be painted with all colours and is easy to design.
The blue ‘front pedestal’ under the bag-holder is waterresistant
plywood. I used this because it leaves a good
surface on the walls after drilling holes and you can also
use a reamer to polish the holes to right dimensions.
This ‘pedestal’ is moving up and down, supported by two
pillars made of delrin or aluminium.
The wedge lifting the gun when pushed forwards, is
pure wood, it´s covered with Teflon tape to get a smooth
and slippery surface. The white ‘mushroom’ is a special
plastic (delrin). It is the heart of the rest, pushing it
to the left moves the aiming point to the left and vice
versa. Turning the hat gives fine tuning of height,
enough to hold off a bull-size if needed.
My latest idea – in the rough
Rimfire Benchrest by Carl Boswell.
Old materials - new ideas!
sawing it I painted the sides to prevent moisture
getting in.
Conclusion
At the moment Jens is still developing
his ideas, possibly for a more complex
model, beyond the basic and cheaper
starter idea you see here. There
are others that are considering DIY
products along the same lines, reading
some threads on benchrest forums.
Where the research goes can only
be positive, as it is just thinking in
a different way. Again, as long as it
works, let’s use ‘wacky’ ideas like this,
even for a basic need like allowing
easier and cheaper access to the sport.
Until next time, shoot straight - using
your new wooden front rest!
If you would like a plan and details of
how to manufacture this rest please
email Jens at - jens.lagas@netikka.fi
In this way he can monitor interest in
the design and the idea generally.
I thank Jens for sharing this with us.
Innovative? Absolutely!
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