SURELY arrived!!!

At long last I have my Thomas HPX in 22 caliber!

I had went to meet Mike Niksch last October at his place to witness first hand how well his HPX shot and to try it out to see if I liked it. Suffice it to say I liked it and tried to get him him to me sell me his right then, uh nope he had promised that rifle to someone else. So I left back home later that weekend and proceeded to try and talk myself out of buying one. I lasted a couple weeks by the time I weighed the alternatives, thought better of those notions, and decided to send off the deposit for mine. I'm still kind of mad at myself for not giving Mike the deposit before I left his place and the reason why is because of my procrastination Mike had already gotten a month or more worth of orders which set me back that long, darn it! So my advice to anyone considering a Thomas is to send the deposit ASAP! 

I named it "SURELY". The story behind the name I chose is from back a few months ago when I was texting my buds on Team Centercut the photos of the groups Mike Niksch of Thomas Air had just sent me. I think it was 50 shots he did with his HPX inside 1/2" at 50Y and also a 22rf BR target for 3 cards he shot at 50Y which scored 749! It was then that it occured to me that if I missed it was "surely" going to be my fault, and also that a gun capable of such precision was "surely" going to help me to win sometimes!!!! It also sounds like Shirley just for the fun of it. So there you have it.

About a week later from ordering the rifle I got the bright idea of going totally over board 😁and decided to call up custom stock maker Steve Corcoran for a specific HYBRD stock I had been contemplating. Basically since I wanted to shoot both BenchRest comps, and Extreme Field Target comps, I wanted a stock that was equally good for both disciplines. Instead of going into all those details well here it is. The stock was created by Steve to be able to remove, lower, or rise, the cheek piece. Move the butt pad up, down, in or out to change LOP, as well as angled left or right – away or into the shoulder. For BR(see pic #5) I can also attach either the tall or the shorter rear bag riders underneath the bottom of the rear of the stock and underneath the front of the stock is a T-slot rail in which the 3" wide wooden front bag rider can be attached, or a picatinny rail which I can attach my bipod to. Steve was great to deal with and he also came up with the design you see here.

Due to bad weather, etc, I've only shot 35 22 caliber MRD's through it today on my 50Y spinner. I doubt I would have missed a dime and it was fairly windy out. I'm very pleased of course! Later at some point I'll update with some photos of groups.

Thanks Mike for such a fine rifle, and Thankyou Steve for such a unique and pretty walnut stock!

The rings are ARC, the scope is a March HM 5-42×56, and the bipod is a LRA. The 25.4gr MRD's are going approx 920-ish fps.