In Part II, I turned a rectangular piece of carbon fiber into a basic extra light foregrip. Time to fabricate the extended titanium tubular magazine.
Ammo capacity is a big deal in 3-gun competitions. Taking inspiration from the shotguns typically used in the sport, I wanted to extend my Henry's magazine tube beyond the length of the barrel. Doing so, increases its capacity from 7 to 10 rounds.
To keep the additional weight from the long mag tube as little as possible, I chose a 24" titanium tube as the outer shell (here's the link to the exact one I bought). Henry makes a 10-round inner magazine tube for some of it's longer-barrel lever action rifles, so I grab one of those to be my inner tube. Below you can see the original 7-round tube magazine that comes stock with the Henry X, and below that is the makings for my light 10-rounder.
The first cuts I needed to make was for the tab-lock thingy at the muzzle end of the mag. I marked it and rough cut it slowly, making sure that I didn't go too deep of make the channel too wide and risk the inner tube rolling out.
Then I flipped the titanium tube over and cut it down to size so that it was ~1/16" longer than the inner tube. This is the same overhang that the outer tube has on the magazine tube that came with the rifle.
Below you can see the original and my 10-rounder laid side-by-side.... not bad. I was glad that I didn't fudge something up on the titanium tube, becuase it turns out that titanium isn't cheap.
I'm not going to cut a window in the bottom of my extended tube mag because the handguard will prevent that style of loading anyway. Thanks Henry for adding side-gates to your tactical lever gats.
Finally, here she is installed on the rifle both with and without the foregrip.
Oh. what's that? The Strike Industries X-Comp Element I picked to cap the muzzle? You betcha. I picked that comp for a couple reasons:
It is small enough to fit inside the 1 inch wide handguard and doesn't add a ton of weight
Strike has a thread adapter that allows the X-Comp to work on a number of thread types, including the 5/8x24 on the Henry X
