NEW SINGLE SHOT ACTIONS DESIGNED and MANUFACTURED IN AUSTRALIA SPECIFICALLY FOR BENCH REST and F CLASS TARGET SHOOTING.
The team at Armaments by Design in Cairns have now completed almost three years of design, development and proof testing of two new single shot rifle actions for the target shooting market in Australia and across the World.
This has been a mammoth effort involving many hundreds of manhours of design, manufacturing and proof testing. We own a fully equipped CNC machine shop with all equipment required to manufacture almost every component used in a rifle action inhouse. Our CNC machines include 3,5 and 7 axis turning and milling machines, CMM measurement machines as well as EDM wire cut and die sinking machines. We also utilise internal and external cylindrical grinding machines, small bore honing machine and a wide range of smaller specialist machines, tooling, measuring and testing equipment.
The actions have been fully designed inhouse utilising a lifetime of experience in both recreational and target shooting by the business owners and family. Family members are skilled and experienced trade qualified machinists and qualified Mechanical Engineers, and these skills have been widely utilised in the action designs. Rather than follow moving trends and fads, we have analysed the design and manufacturing from an engineering viewpoint with the aim of producing a very strong, safe, well-engineered product manufactured to close tolerances from quality raw materials.
We have stripped, inspected and detailed many different manufacturers actions and rifles and selected what we believe are the best design features from them. We have discussed design features widely with shooters in these two disciplines over the development time frame and have made many small design changes when we believed they would result in a better product.
In line with our policy of being able to offer a complete action ready for the barrel and stock of your choice, we have also designed and manufactured trigger hangers, scope mounting rails to suit dovetail and PIC/NATO mounting systems, scope mounts in a range of sizes, trigger guards and bedding blocks for these actions.
Both our actions are a conventional cock on opening of the bolt lift. The smaller two lug BR action has 90degree bolt lift and the larger three lug a 60degree bolt lift.
The two lug action will be available with two different bolt face diameters, 0.450” and 0.478” to suit the 6mm PPC and 6mm BR cartridges as well as some 30 calibre cartridges based on the 6mm BR case and other calibres such as .308. This action has 70mm of bolt travel.
The three lug action will be available with the 0.450”, 0.478” and 0.540” bolt face recess diameter. These will suit a wide range of standard and magnum cartridges from 6mmPPC up to the 8mm Rem Magnum. The bolt face on both actions has a 25degree cone, similar to other target actions in the marketplace. This action has 80mm of bolt travel.
Sako style extractors are utilised on both actions, and the bolts are available with or without ejector pins. We also stock three different strength ejector pin springs. Springs are easily changed by the action owner.
We will be manufacturing both actions in a range of options to suit both right and left hand shooters with an option on single or dual ports as well. A range of bolt handles are also offered for both actions with three different knob designs and two lengths available in each design.
Barrel tenon design and threads offered initially for the two lug action will be 1.0625” x 18tpi to suit barrels threaded for BAT actions, but other threads will be available upon request.
The larger three lug action will have 1.0625” x 18tpi and 16tpi versions available.
Initially, we will be offering only 34.3mm (1.35”) diameter round body actions but have designs ready for octagonal bodies as well.
Both actions will utilise the now industry common Rem 700 clone trigger in a hanger. We manufacture a range of trigger hangers and pins and import and sell the range of Sidhe triggers from Italy. These triggers are the only armament product we sell that is not designed and manufactured by us.
Scope rails are manufactured to suit the actions in one or two piece design and are double doweled and screwed to ensure perfect alignment and absolutely no movement under any recoil situation. All rails manufactured to suit our doweled AbD actions are also fitted with jacking screw threads to allow easy removal of the rails from the action.
Dovetail and Picatinny/NATO rails are also available in a range of MOA configurations.
Our Picatinny/NATO rails utilise a high tensile blued steel cross bolt that is machined a neat fit into the rail cutouts to absorb all recoil and prevent movement of the mounts on the rail.
Scope rings are also manufactured in 30mm, 34mm, 35mm and 36mm tube sizes, with or without level vials included in one of the ring pair. They will be available in polished aluminium or black anodised finish.
All dowel pins and screw threads in our actions are ISO standard metric and therefore replacement dowels and screws are available Australia wide. The only exception to this is the trigger hanger dowel pins which are imperial dimensioned 0.125” to suit the range of custom triggers in the marketplace.
Only quality stainless steels from Europe and high tensile alloy steel from the only Australian manufacturer remaining are utilised in the manufacture of our actions and all raw material received is checked for composition and hardness condition by our own XRF spectrometer and hardness test machine. The materials used in manufacturing include heat treated, hardened and tempered 630 Stainless steel action bodies and 4140 alloy steel bolts. Other smaller components are manufactured from 416 stainless steel and D2 tool steel. This material is ordered in bulk quantities direct from the steel mills in Europe to our specifications.
At Armaments by Design, we believe in keeping all manufacturing inhouse wherever possible, and the only items in our actions that are not manufactured by us are the dowel pins, springs and screws.
Testing has been carried out in a purpose built test chamber utilising the latest NATO test equipment and test standards from Europe.
The prototype actions have had many hundreds of rounds fired through them testing chamber pressures and lock times from trigger pull to ignition. We will be publishing these test results in time and producing a video of the testing procedure utilised to provide the proof that our action designs are exceptionally strong and safe to use.
The two lug bench rest action designed for the shorter range BR cartridges was tested with 6mmPPC cartridges loaded to maximum with the normal powders used in this cartridge and then overloaded to achieve the required test pressures by using the wrong powders for this cartridge. Maximum pressure achieved with this procedure was 13,743Bar (199,286psi) and the action worked flawlessly after this testing. No damage was done to the action as a result of these pressures, but the case was obviously damaged beyond reuse.
The three lug action designed for the F Class, Fly and other longer range shooting was tested to 10,152 Bar (147,200psi) chamber pressure utilising 7mm SAUM and 308 Winchester cartridges. That action fired over 800 rounds of varying pressures and was utilised to perfect and verify our firing pin design. Extensive trials were carried out using different flat disc springs as well as conventional compression springs of varying lengths and coil design and we ultimately settled on a conventional compression spring for a variety of reasons.
During our rifle action testing procedures, we monitor chamber pressures produced by varying loads, firing pin lock times, firing pin performance, cartridge ignition consistency, bolt handle lift forces and smoothness of operation, case extraction and general action performance. All our prototype actions are put through this procedure and then returned to the workshop for NDT Ultrasonic crack testing, CMM measurement to check for any expansion of the action components, and close examination to look for damage to any components.
Our test chamber has been designed for action testing, rather than ammunition testing, but the Kistler piezoelectric transducers we use in testing are the same as used by NATO for ammunition testing and we follow the NATO test procedures.
The detail specs mostly looked at for high speed data acquisition are both the sensor and the Data Acquisition Unit. (DAQ) The Kistler DAQ unit we own can collect data at 1 million samples per second. The Piezoelectric pressure sensor we use has a rise time of 2 µsec (a unit of time equal to one millionth (10⁻⁶) of a second.) and a natural frequency of 150kHz. These units combined can capture all the data we need to comprehensively test our rifle actions.
We also utilise an accelerometer to measure various ignition and lock times of each action so that any figures we publish can be verified by actual testing rather than theoretical calculations. An accelerometer is a small sensor and is attached to the rear end of a specially manufactured firing pin which extends past the back of the bolt shroud. It records first movement of the firing pin against primer strike time, first primer ignition time, first powder ignition time and finally peak pressure time. All of these events can be seen in the graph produced by the recording equipment and are measured in milliseconds.
Manufacturing of a limited number of each action for commercial sale has commenced and the first three lug actions have now been sold in May 2026 and fitted to F Class rifles. These rifles and an extensive range of our manufactured armament accessories will be on display at the Kings Shoot in Townsville on 22nd and 23rd of May being held at the NQRA shooting complex on Hervey’s Range Road.
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