dznnf7,
Glad you liked the rifle.
Morris Melani profiled the barrel, designed and made the take down mechanism, made the peep sight base and did some of the metal preparation. Jim White of Wasilla, AK is the engraver. Most of the designing and metal preparation as well as the stock work was done by me.
The rifle weighs 5 lbs, 11 ozs and the barrel is 24" long and quite petite. The barrels on my other project that is on this forum are 26" long. Never having handled a WR rook and rabbit rifle I'm not sure how the barrels would compare but the WR rifles shown in the Winfer-Rowe Vol. 8 book all have 27" barrels.
The old classic miniature rifles haven't received much coverage on this forum and would be interesting to see more of it with photographs. To my eye among all of the old classic single shot rifles the miniature Alex Henry is one of the most beautiful rifles ever made and the miniature Fraser is next.
While many consider the miniature Martini homely the flood of Cadets and their very low price demeaned their value as the basis of a high quality custom rifle and resulted in some very ugly amateur stock work. I think at one time or another many of the gunmakers that Petrov researched built custom miniature Martini rifles but this was pre-Cadet days and the actions of all of the rifles that I have seen photos of have been take-down Model 6s,12s or 15s. An Amoskeag auction several years ago had two take-down Model 6 Martini rifles and the engraving on those rifles was the inspiration for the engraving on my four-barrel project. The Hoffman miniature Martini that I have has been the stock design inspiration for my Martini projects. It is an elegant rifle and in my opinion simply as good as a Martini can be made to look.
Too, the scopes that have been put on the miniature Martinis are not in keeping with the svelte action profile. Big scopes mounted on big bulky quarter ribs has been the norm for post war custom Martini work and it all looks out of place to me. I'm using a 2 1/2 power Zeiss Zielklein 22mm scope and that is about right for a cartridge that probably shouldn't be used in hunting conditions much past 150 yards.
