Jester896
Senior Clown
I posted this pick in the other thread but here it is again
I ordered a Shadetree Engineering Joystick top to go on the Caldwell rest.
only mod I had to do to this point was clean up part #6 with an emery board.
You can see that the rifle stop is bare steel.
as you can see the hand wheel is no longer on it...well we fixed that
The wheel will not come off the original head without taking the bag out which is a little bit of a pain. I wrote Caldwell to see if I could get another wheel since they listed parts with numbers in the manual. No go...if I send them a picture of the old one broken they would send me another one. Told me they don't sell parts.
I took it to my buddy's on Saturday. We looked at it and I told him I was thinking about cutting that portion off so I could swap the hand wheel back and forth.
Then it was kinda...hold this...I got an idea. Next thing I know it it is apart...he has the shaft locked in the mill. He indexed it then drilled and tapped the other end. He didn't have a metric tap so we could use the old bolt so we threaded the other end 1/4-20. Then installed it upside down like this. You can see the tapped end in the pic above. I'm not sure the whole thing took 10 minutes from chuck to unchuck....and I didn't have to heat the threaded
shaft up cutting it off.
then screwed it back all back together
Wheel screws off the bottom of both of them now and swap the bearing and 2 different heads to shoot from. With the narrow bag that came with the Caldwell... it will be great for a hunting rifles with a narrow front end. I will order another wider front bag for wider stocks at a later time.... probably when I order a taller rear bag.
The joy stick and wide slick front bag will be better for benchrest type shooting
we added some of our Shadetree to the Shadetree. So far the only thing I can see room for improvement in is the rest top doesn't have a bubble level to level it up like on the original top. I have some small ones on the way to mount on the stock stop piece when they come in. I stopped at Lowe's on the way and grabbed a bag of threaded screw protectors for the rifle stop.
I ordered a Shadetree Engineering Joystick top to go on the Caldwell rest.
only mod I had to do to this point was clean up part #6 with an emery board.
You can see that the rifle stop is bare steel.
as you can see the hand wheel is no longer on it...well we fixed that
The wheel will not come off the original head without taking the bag out which is a little bit of a pain. I wrote Caldwell to see if I could get another wheel since they listed parts with numbers in the manual. No go...if I send them a picture of the old one broken they would send me another one. Told me they don't sell parts.
I took it to my buddy's on Saturday. We looked at it and I told him I was thinking about cutting that portion off so I could swap the hand wheel back and forth.
Then it was kinda...hold this...I got an idea. Next thing I know it it is apart...he has the shaft locked in the mill. He indexed it then drilled and tapped the other end. He didn't have a metric tap so we could use the old bolt so we threaded the other end 1/4-20. Then installed it upside down like this. You can see the tapped end in the pic above. I'm not sure the whole thing took 10 minutes from chuck to unchuck....and I didn't have to heat the threaded
shaft up cutting it off.then screwed it back all back together
Wheel screws off the bottom of both of them now and swap the bearing and 2 different heads to shoot from. With the narrow bag that came with the Caldwell... it will be great for a hunting rifles with a narrow front end. I will order another wider front bag for wider stocks at a later time.... probably when I order a taller rear bag.
The joy stick and wide slick front bag will be better for benchrest type shooting
we added some of our Shadetree to the Shadetree. So far the only thing I can see room for improvement in is the rest top doesn't have a bubble level to level it up like on the original top. I have some small ones on the way to mount on the stock stop piece when they come in. I stopped at Lowe's on the way and grabbed a bag of threaded screw protectors for the rifle stop.
