Building A Hawken Shop Kit?

[N.Y. Yankee]

$1650.00. Have you built one? How are they and what level?

 

[Ames]

Have you built any gun yet? Hawkens can be a beast.

 

[Grenadier1758]

$1650.00. Have you built one? How are they and what level?

I haven't built one. One of the members of my gun club built several of them. These kits are based pretty closely to an actual Hawken rifle owned by the Hawken Shop. The completed rifles I have seen are excellent. The skill set needed to build one is as @Ames suggests is not for the faint of heart.

 

[DuncNZ]

Why is the Hawken so hard to build compared with, say, a Lancaster long rifle ? especially in a quality kit form ?

 

[Grenadier1758]

It's getting the much larger barrel to be properly aligned with the lock to have a pleasing transition to the wrist keeping the forestock from getting slab sided as the stock molds into the nose piece. For an architecture that seems so simple, it really is quite complex. The Lancaster rifles have relatively slim swamped barrels that lend to a slender forestock. It is easy to have the lock fit to the wrist to be parallel with the more slender barrel, yet still have a slender wrist to transition to a graceful butt stock. The Hawken rifle has to have the lock go the other way and can't be parallel to the large, tapered barrel but still result in a functional, controllable wrist area. It is difficult to build a rifle that can attain a decent balance with the heavy barrel to be controlled by the curved butt plate on the bicep and use of the body to aim the gun for offhand shooting.

 

[bptactical]

^^^^^ great description