Portable Front Rest for F-Class Shooters
The F-Class Nationals are coming up soon. The Fifth Annual F-Class Championship will be hosted Sept. 30 – Oct. 4 in Lodi, Wisconsin (Winnequah Gun Club). Over 140 shooters are expected to attend. The Course of Fire at the F-Class Nationals requires shooting at multiple distances. That means you’ve got to carry your rifle and rest back and forth to various shooting positions. With rifles that top 20 pounds, it’s no fun to haul a super-heavy front rest around. Butch Lambert has come up with a solution — a special light-weight front rest.
Lambert Crafts Light-weight Front Rest
At the request of Larry Bartholome, current member and former captain of the U.S. F-Class team, Butch Lambert of Shadetree Engineering & Accuracy (S.E.A.), has designed and fabricated a lightweight yet stable front rest prototype. Larry wanted a unit that was less burdensome to haul between firing lines than the typical cast-iron or “heavy metal” front pedestal. (That’s Larry with his spectacular “Captain America” Shehane red, white, and blue MBR Tracker stock.)
Other than the steel center hub, the rest is built from aircraft-grade 6061 T-6 aluminum, which can be TIG-welded and hard-anodized. To keep weight down, the three horizontal legs are hollow tubes with flutes or slots milled top and bottom. Butch sent us these photos of the new rest, noting: “It weighs 2.25 lbs without the top. I set one of our unfinished rest tops on it. I moved the back leg to the front to get it out of the way. Larry is ‘wrong handed’, so I made it left-handed. I hope to get it TIG-welded together next week and plated. It is definitely easy to lug around, but I prefer something heavier for benchrest shooting. For F-Class, under a 22-lb rifle, Larry believes it should work well.”
The announcement was made by Cav. Ugo Gussalli Beretta at an event at his home in Clinton, Maryland, on August 20. At this event, Cav. Beretta was inducted into the NRA’s Golden Ring of Freedom, the highest level of the Association’s comprehensive donor recognition society. This new pledge brings the Beretta Group’s gift commitments to the NRA to over $2 million. Previous gifts have benefited the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, NRA Youth Programs, Hunting and Wildlife Conservation, and the National Firearms Museum.
