Pete,
Thanks for the compliment. Actually, with a portable bench, touching it with your belly, or the side of your chest is a bad idea. It tends to shake the bench. The whole point of the design is to be able to sit behind the rifle, and not touch the bench with the front or side of my chest. If you are referring to the long angled part on the right side at the back of the bench, I agree, but as I said this is a working prototype. Sitting behind the rifle, with my shoulders fairly square to the line of the barrel, all that the right side of the bench does is support my right arm, while I adjust my windage and elevation with the top and rear leg of the rest. One hitch that I have run into is that when I move my arm on the bench, the cross hairs move on the target. I can be steady and they will be still, but because the shift is somewhat unpredictable, it makes aiming more time consuming. On the other hand, if I loosen up the side tension on my windage top, and put two hands on the rifle, making sure not to pull down on the forend, I can make the final correction with my hands. For sighting in, and varmint work this is OK, but for playing with my bench rifles, I would like to solve the problem, and have a couple of ideas on how to do this that I will try. The last time I shot off of it, I tried a test group, aiming and shooting not touching either the bench or the rifle,except for the trigger, and the results were excellent, but this would be too fatiguing to do all the time.
Boyd