Thanks, Scott

I use wheel bearing grease, lightly, and then level the action body to the knox form.

One or more cross test vial bubble levels are helpful.

Make a comparison from the top of the body rear at the bolt well, and the body underside parallel surfaces.

Also have a look at the extractor cut, inside the body ring and the angled mating surface on the barrel tenon.

Things are not always as they appear at this location. The two surfaces may not always be equidistant to each other so dont get hung up on that detail too much.

Make sure when the barrel is hand screwed tight, it's slightly less than a 1/4 " from TDC.

And the threads are not bound up/sticky before the body/knox meet, hand tightened.

this from the amourers and how they did it, written by Peter L

http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerdog/generalstorage/peterlaidlerpostsleeenfieldforums/Breeching%20Up.pdf" rel="nofollow - http://photos.imageevent.com/badgerd...ching%20Up.pdf

Wow! That's way too much for me to digest with my first cup of coffee. LOL!

Thanks.

Thanks. This whole level thing looks to be the way to go with this.

Edit: Just noticed I need to touch-up the extractor cut in the barrel. A little file and polish perhaps.

The No.1, aka SMLE is so hand-crafted there's no reliable flat surface I can think of: the top of the charger bridge is not a controlled surface.   The bottom of the bolt way is too narrow and inaccessible.  The shoulders inside the mag well should be consistent and the bottom face of the receiver might be.  Probably all done by eye back in the day; there were plenty of people with good eyes around back then.  

If you can get a No.1 to breech evenly and tightly on both the rear face of the barrel and the rear face of the shoulder that would always be preferable IMO, but the default was the rear face of the barrel.  One might ask why they bothered to put on a shoulder at all then, but the "reinforce" over the chamber had to end somewhere!

Breeching washers under the shoulder were acceptable on the No.4 and a person who wanted to could make some up from shim stock if they wanted the shoulder on a No.1 to turn up tight against the front face of the receiver.   That would be in a case where the barrel turned up against the inside face of receiver in about the right position for final tightening (as in the photo above), but where there was a gap between the shoulder of the barrel and the front face of the receiver.

Nothing can be taken off the rear face of the barrel without altering chamber length etc. and back in ye day it was probably just "selective fitting" aka swapping parts around until you get a reasonable fit.