At the last match some shooters were kicking around the idea of building a rifle stock out of aluminum tubing. It would use a conventional barreled action, and be somewhat similar to the Ljutic Space Gun of the 1980s.

But would such a tubular stock be considered legal by the rule book? The rules say the stock must be of conventional design, and the Ljutic was a production item available in several calibers.

What does the peanut gallery say?

I don't think designs matter, but it complicates things. I would say no.

I had been wondering about whether a tube gun woud be legal for centerfire. A tube gun looks rather like a Ljutic space gun. A Remington 700 barreled action fits into a tube and an AR15 stock and handguard are attached.
The are very stiff do well at long distance high power.
See more at www.tubegun.net.

Stock comb must be below the bore center line, so AR's, tube guns and the Ljutic are all DQ. Unfortunate.

Seems I remember Zander shooting an Anschutz mounted into an Anschutz aluminum position stock at Florida, or Winnsboro...can't remember the location....was interesting...Of course it was legal only for standard class.

kitty

If it fit the template for the heavy gun you could shoot it all day long. I don't think it would qualify as a hunter which brings me to the topic of hunter guns. What the hell does a hunter gun look like?????

I think they should be hunter guns.
a. weight limits..... 7 1/2 for SB and 8 1/2 for HP
b. scope limit of 10x and no adjustable knobs. Tape the knobs after sight-in
c. 2 lb trigger
d. who cares what they look like?

Jerry, hunter or hunting is just a name given to the class, it used to be called Lite Rifle remember?
Not too many rifles would make the 7.5 lbs limit you proposed, we used to hollow the heck out of our Anschutz 54 sporter rifle's stocks just to make weight.
As for HP we would have to go back to #3 barrels and with those rules my feeling are that you would lose all the shooters that have recently put together their dream rifles. Canadian shooters used to have rules similar to what you described but abandoned them a long time ago. Its hard enough to hit the silhouettes with good rifles and scopes let alone putting other restrictions on the game. Another thing is that not too many hunters are confident enough with their abilities to shoot game off hand at the distances we shoot silhouettes but if the distances were reduced by half then we could have a game with rifles that met your criteria for hunter.
We did it back in the day when I was introduced to metallic silhouettes at my home range in Corona, CA around 1976-77 and the winning scores were close to 15X20
My rifle was a Ruger M77 in .308 thin barrel and a 3X9 Redfield with external adjustments. We used to put the targets directly into the dirt and sometimes we would ring the rams with 308 and 30-06 rifles if we shot them at 500 meters plus the total scores were not very good that is why the match director chose to cut the distances to the targets in half.

Mach 2 wrote:So if a guy is building one from scratch just incorporate in a slight dog leg bend to get the "cheekpiece" down below the bore centerline. This way would also allow a standard cleaning rod easy unobtructed use.

That's a good rule of thumb for any stock, whether you use a cleaning rod or not. After that the "Conventional style" and "Buttplate may not extend below the lower line of the stock" clauses in 3.1(d) are worrisome, and the trigger hand grip may also cause trouble. Personally, it's past time to recognize the AR and tube stock as new forms of "Traditional style stock", but that hasn't happened.

Tony, I still call it light rifle. Hard headed I guess. Could be that 7 1/2 may be a little light but 8 1/2 is too heavy for SB in my opinion. If it is going to be called hunter, it should resemble that. It doesn't now. Who hunts with a 22 rifle and a 40 power scope with target knobs? Looking at the scores between standard and hunter, there isn't any difference so what's the point? Many shoot the same gun in both classes which shows you how close they realy are.

Good point about the need to legalize AR designs for our game. I know a local shooter (former PPC Master class competitor) who was looking for a more laid back type of shooting competition due to his bad knees. He is a huge AR fan and was all set to play our game with a .22 upper until he found out the gun would not be legal.

Our sport needs more shooters, so why not have an exemption for the AR? Those black rifles are hugely popular.

Besides, a rule change would help convice my wife that I NEED another gun!

Tony, I do know we will never go back to the old rules Canada had for the hunter rifle.

I guess we should get rid of some of the rules we have. We have way too many that don't seem to mean much of anything. At best we should freezt the rules we have now for about 5 years. I think we have too many people on the rule comittie that arn't even silhouette shooters. Let me rant, I'm harmless when it comes to making any changes.