Custom Rifles of Great Britain

Bruce Potts will be very familiar to readers of Gun Mart, as he has been contributing articles for a couple of decades now and writes articles on shotguns, airguns, fullbore rifles and reloading. He’s also an avid ‘wildcatter’ and has many custom rifles in rather bespoke calibres and writes on the subject each month in Shooting Sports magazine. He obviously knows his stuff and when he told me a couple of years ago that he was writing a book on custom rifles, I was keen to see it when it was published. Well, I have a copy here and it’s a handsome work!

The basics

Bruce starts out by describing the various types of custom rifles that are available in the UK; ‘factory custom’ or ‘special editions’, ‘semi-custom’, where a standard rifle is improved in some way, possibly being re-barrelled and/or bedded and lastly the ‘full-blown’ custom rifle that is built by a gunsmith from the ground up.

He looks at the basic components of the rifle, starting with the stock and the various types that can be employed such as walnut, laminate, synthetic etc. and then moves onto the action itself and then the barrel, which are either imported or produced here in the UK. The all-important subjects of scope mounts, optics and triggers are also looked at and it’s amazing how much choice there is!

A custom rifle will work best with ammunition that has been loaded specifically for it and the author delves into this subject also.

 

Custom houses

Even though the British shooting scene is small in comparison to countries like the US, we have many highly skilled gunsmiths here who can work their magic on a standard, out of the box rifle, or create a rifle from the components specified by the purchaser. Bruce spent a long time visiting them and testing their wares (it’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it!) and the reader gets to see various examples of their products.

Bruce’s magazine articles are always accompanied by excellent photographs and this book is just the same! Many of the images are like mini ‘still life’ works of art, beautifully composed, with clear close-ups of component parts, hand-cut chequering and operations like chambering and threading a barrel.

 

Conclusion

All in all, this is a well-structured and written book and anyone looking at getting a custom rifle built will find all the information they’ll need.