REeastman,
I'm sorry for the confusion, I may have miss labeled this stock when I designed it about 1 and a half years ago. I never owned one of Rays stocks, because I thought the design was not stiff enough in the fore-end. Not that in reality it matters but for my preference I wanted something stiffer. Rays is a very good stock obviously it has set a lot of records. I designed what I will refer now to as the "low-pro" to be a stiffer stock, and it is. There might be about 8 of these stocks on guns that are already shooting, and 2 of them are on my guns. I never pushed them hard and since I will be leaving to OK, I figured it would be good for someone to continue with this.
I'm sorry if this causes you some hard feeling, but please direct them at me and not Ryan.
After all how much different can stocks be when you compare a st1000, a McM f-class, Rays excellent stock and my design?? The obvious trend with all of these is a lower profile front. the "low pro" is different in that; it actually started life 4 years ago as a Tooley design, which I then turned into an adjustable f-class stock , by flattening the butt, adding adjustments, and then changing the fore-end profile and rail-road tracking the underside. This design seen a wider spread use in the first year or so. The grip was virtually unchanged and the "low-pro" shares the same grip.
On the request of some f-o shooters at the 2011 Nationals, They wanted to see a lower fore-end, on my design, I thought on this for some time and knew the result would be accusations that it was a copy of something, It is not easy to design and implement new stocks and does cost a bit of money to get going on. well I decided to dive in anyway, WHY, to get rich? no just to make something that was what I perceived to be better than what was available.
So the "low pro" shares the same modified tooley rear with flat and adj, cheek. I would say Rays looks more like the McMillian rear and grip. I took the fore-end from about where the loading port is and started to widen it out at that point, kept the thick belly line as far forward as possible. and then tapered up to a rail road tracked bag riding area. This produced a very stiff fore-end compared to the other designs.
So I accomplished the sale of less than a dozen stocks, I'm not out there pushing this design and a lot of that had to do with my stock cutter falling behind and not getting me product in a timely fashion. I feel Ryan can take this design to the next level and by offering it the only thing he is doing is offering a CHOICE, you may chose to use Rays, but lets not deny someone else the ability to choose. After-all many stocks share similarities, this is by nature as they all function similarly, if you really study the profiles of this stock you will see it really shares little to nothing of what is currently out-there.
Pretty much any color is possible. If its a real oddball color it could take a little while to get.
