Seven year itch: building a custom .303 hunting rifle

A few years ago, I swapped a 1917 Lithgow heavy-barrelled target rifle for a cut-down No 4 Savage sporter conversion by Roly Muscat. It had an 18-inch barrel with an SLR flash eliminator on the muzzle (for balance, I think) and a nasty, hard synthetic stock. 

A nice Hillver bridge mount was firmly locked on. It shot beautifully with a wide range of bullets and took goats, rusa and foxes on several hunts.

Originally, I mounted a 40-year old Kahles 4x scope, then replaced it with a Bushnell Elite 3-9×40. They both worked well. Nuff said.

I got an itch to improve velocity and performance by replacing the short barrel with an original 25.2-inch factory barrel. Gunsmith mate Tom Smith of T-Bone Shipwrighting came to the rescue with an unused Sportco chambered barrel (complete with bayonet lugs) and removed the old barrel to install it.

We worked through a few teething issues with it and my subsequent accuracy tests revealed the new setup to be every bit as accurate as it was before, but with only marginal increases in velocities.

A few years later, having seen beautiful Lee Speed sporters and other lovely walnut-stocked Lee Enfield conversions on YouTube — damn you, YouTube; you reduce my bank balance routinely — I wanted to put a nice sporter fore-end and butt on the rifle. 

A few phone calls and 30km on the odometer netted me a lovely pale walnut Monte Carlo-styled buttstock for $30 from David and Ken at Western Firearms. A rifle-club friend, Warwick Sharpe, gave me a reddish-stained original No 4 Mk 2 fore-end.

I got them both home and sanded off the old finishes with gradually finer grades. Now the tricky bit — matching the tone and colour of the two stock components. 

Using Feast Watson walnut stain on a rag, I incrementally darkened the buttstock with a few coats and lightly applied one coat to the forend, coming up with what I considered to be a reasonable match.

Then I used turps to dilute a small container of Feast Watson satin-finish tung oil for floors, which I brushed on before sun drying and lightly rubbing with steel wool. 

I repeated the process until I’d applied nine coats, though without sanding for the last two. 

The oil I used was from a 20-year-old tin but I have not been able to find this same satin-finished oil in web searches or at the hardware store. My four-litre tin is still half full and will see me out.

Realising that a Mark 2 fore-end has a gaping maw where the recoil ‘draws’ should seat, I enlisted Tom at T-Bone to reconfigure the trigger guard and recoil shoulder bedding sooner rather than later and, while he was at it, bed the fore-end and rails in the Bisley method.

I had done this myself on full-wood Savages and Fazakerly No 4s. Seriously sub-MOA results ensued. I was consistently able to hit stationary clay targets at 800 yards on still days shooting 174gn Sierra Match Kings. However, my work inside and out-of-sight left a lot to be desired.

With Tom’s work done, my accuracy tests to date have been very gratifying, as hoped and expected.

I wanted a compact low-power variable to fit the one-inch rings and bought a new-condition Leupold VX Freedom 1.5-4×20 riflescope from a nice fellow in Melbourne for reasonable money. 

It is a beautiful aesthetic match for the rifle and the adjustment turrets have huge repeatable elevation-adjustment range of 125 MOA and magnificently visible numbers on the turrets which are protected by screw-on caps. 

Bore sighting was a simple matter and the 13.3mm exit pupil at 1.5 power is amazingly accommodating.

The magazine was my next quest. The cheapest five-round, almost-flush magazine I could reliably find online was £150, so I asked my go-to guy at the rifle club, Warwick. The next Saturday he turned up at the range with one. 

It feeds beautifully, so now I have the choice of five- and 10-round magazines to take bush or shoot service optic or F-Class (maybe).

What now? In its immediate future, I see some fair-chase goat, fallow and sambar hunting. In its latest configuration, my sporter has proven to be nice to carry afield, more accurate than necessary and a pleasure to behold.

What next? I may take a few inches off the forend and beavertail it, install uniform sling swivel studs and crop the barrel 2.5 inches. Maybe…