While it's true that Mike Bush designed the repeater conversion for the 40X/XB and the V22 repeater action, to the best of my knowledge, Vudoo Gun Works never offered a repeater conversion for the Remington actions. Mike put the CAD/CAM drawings out there for the conversion to several gunsmiths, but - again, to the best of my knowledge - Jonathan Elrod was pretty much the one guy who specialized in doing the conversions while Mike & VGW were working to bring the V22 action to market. I've always thought that one of the main reasons Mike designed the conversion was to get as many of his V22 magazines out there & into the hands of a good number of shooters to 'proof' them and provide him with a lot of feedback whilst he was working on the V22 action. And no doubt, when guys got their relatively inexpensive CMP 40X/XB actions converted and were able to reap the advantages of having a .22RF repeater that was nearly identical in weight & proportions to their M700 CF rifles, it was a game changer, whether they wanted an accurate RF trainer for their CF comp rifles, or for all the .22RF competition games like NRL22 & 22RF PRS that were just becoming popular. I've always thought that his marketing strategy was genius - making the repeater conversion available to take advantage of the thousands of CMP 40X/XB rifles out there, and at the same time, creating enough demand for the V22 action so that when they were released, the demand was already there.
I'd bought several of the 40X/XB rifles from the CMP years before the V22 or even its concept had come on the scene, and had come to appreciate what an accurate rifle they were. But the XB heavy bbl model had a truck axle bbl that made it quite a bit heavier than comparable smallbore rifles like the Winchester 52 C&D models that the CMP was also selling, and the European smallbore rifles like the Anschutz 54 & Walther 500 series. The 40X's feeding tray wasn't as easy to work with while slung-up in prone as were the 52Ds or the 54s or 500s. I could more-or-less just toss a round into the action of my Anschutz 1611, while the Remington rifles were a good deal clumsier to feed while in prone. When Vudoo came out with the V22S single shot, they'd made it at least as easy to single load as the M54. Still, I find myself wishing that I'd kept one of the nicer CMP 40XBs in its original smallbore target configuration. Instead, I let a friend have one of my XBs to get his kids into shooting them with the Redfield irons, and sent both the others off to Jelrod for the repeater conversions. They were the pinnacle of Remington's smallbore rifles - though I'm sure that there are plenty of Rem 37 owners out there that will argue that point. I'm just grateful that the CMP made as many of these rifles & all the other former ROTC smallbore rifles they sold over the years available at affordable prices.
