Rifle Accuracy Problems And Their Solutions

Despite the high standards of consistency possible in modern CNC machinery we often see a rifle that seems no different than the one made before it turn in exceptional accuracy. By the same token, the very next rifle will deliver measurably poorer results. No maker is immune. It is the rifle with poor results that finds its way to our shop. While many are mass produced rifles with known quirks, there are others that are sometimes even more diffi cult to diagnose.

Quite often these are high grade rifles that have been carefully assembled but somewhere something went awry. We may have built the rifle ourselves and went by the book and personal experience. Other rifles of the same make turned out just fine, yet one manages to give us problems. I have owned a number of troublesome rifles and worked on others. The standard steps do not always work but eventually something works. When striving for first class results the best products are always a good bet.

I began working with Fajen stocks, still remember the old Bishop types and have worked with quite a few of the excellent Kimber rifles. When I order a rifle barrel it is most often a Shilen but others, including the high-production, low-bid types, have also been addressed. Sometimes there has been a lot of shooting involved, which can become expensive and frustrating for the owner and the gunsmith, but there is no other way to test the end product.

When one of these rifles comes to the shop I ask the elementary questions. First, is the riflea proven firearm that has gone astray? Did it group just fine in the beginning of its life? Did it suddenly suffer a degrade in accuracy? Is it still consistent but sometimes throws flyers? Simply tightening the action and scope mounting screws can be the cure for a rifle that begins having problems. We all know that every screw should be tightened on the rifle. Action screws work loose.

This results in a problem in what I call the key harmonic and the rifle begins to resonate poorly. Let’s also not neglect cleaning. If a rifle comes into the shop with a complaint concerning accuracy the first thing we need to do is to clean the barrel. Heaped on copper deposits are terrible for accuracy. A pitted bore is sometimes terrible but might still produce fair results if cleaned often, however, a barrel with copper deposits simply isn’t going to perform well. Get the bore clean.

Sometimes this is all that is needed. Regarding the barrel another spot to check is the barrel crown. The rifle may have ridden in the rack of a vehicle driving off road and was bumped hard enough to get a nick in the barrel crown. Ham-handed or ten-thumbed cleaning with the wrong types of rods can damage the crown or the rifl ing itself as well. Dings and dents in this area must be addressed. Getting the barrel cleaned, screws tightened and crown checked is the best first step to take with an inaccurate rifle.

Fire the piece and see how it goes. The next item to consider are the sights themselves. While loose screws can be a problem here, the opposite is also sometimes true. Screws may be over tightened. I have examined several scopes that were literally dented by over tightening of the scope mounts. One, a Sigthtron brand scope favored by experienced shooters, was literally crunched but managed to function as designed.

This is a quality optical sight that survived abuse but the Sightron scope was cocked in the mount and I was not certain that we could make the dented scope set right in the mount. The customer was embarrassed by his poor home gunsmithing efforts, but at least he did not ruin the scope. A few episodes of this type and you have a customer who either learns to do simple things or always brings the rifle in for a correctly done job.

It is simple but not necessarily easy to properly mount a scope if you do not do it every day and have not been to the same church as other gunsmiths. I check the scope rings and mounts carefully on every customer rifle. I am sometimes asked what good accuracy is. In this age of off-the-shelf claims for accuracy we need to understand that a two-inch 100 yard group is just fine for most hunting rifles. A rifle that will group three shots from a cold barrel into one inch at 100 yards is still awfully rare.

Given a rifle with a custom stock that is well bedded, a good optical sight, a decent trigger and a quality barrel should group three

Just enough and not too much is ideal. The barrel and stock band area good place to start. shots of premium ammunition into one inch or less at 100 yards. Some will do better, a lot better, but this is the baseline. When working with custom stocks and rifles there is considerable room for error. Depending on skill and tools, some issues may be beyond our control to address but it is within our power to find and correct the problem.

As an example, no one expects a screw on a custom rifle to be too long—if they have never experienced the problem before. A too long forend, action or magazine screw will play hob with accuracy. I check these simple parts first and occasionally there is a problem that needs to be address. Another problem with wood stocks is shrinkage. Look for wear on the contact points. If there is eccentric wear where it should not be then that is the actual, if not desired, contact point.

You will need to sand and shim or bed the stock to correct this problem. Wood shrinks when it becomes saturated with moisture. It may warp to one side or the other. This will ruin accuracy. There is no predicting whether a left warp will send the bullet left or any other predictor but one thing is certain a warped stock produces horrible accuracy. The locking lugs show normal wear and the fitis good for a factory rifle. Sometimes a stock is just fine except for one small detail.

As an example a common problem is the magazine resonating against the action. A magazine should not press against the stock and there must be enough relief between them. Either the magazine should be fi led to alleviate this problem or the stock relieved, whichever seems most expedient. This is a simple alteration to a stock if all else

This Howa rifle shows top notch fit and accuracy. This screw was a little buggered in the head but the threads are just fine for fit and finish. is looking good as far as contact points and bedding. A combination of a too long screw along with a poor magazine-box-to-stock fit recently came to my shop. This rifle, an inexpensive action built into a custom job, had suffered from a wandering zero and poor accuracy. We obtained another action screw, which was noticeably shorter than the screw in the rifle stock.

We also relieved the magazine box and adjusted its fit to the stock. Just because a custom stock company has turned out a hundred good stocks doesn’t mean you will not get one that is off spec. Clearance for the magazine box was easily checked with a jeweler’s screwdriver. When all was said and done, the problem was fixed in less than an hour. A few words on ammunition. During the past few years of ammunition shortage quite a few foreign brands have gotten a foot hold on our soil.

They are produced as cheaply as possible to sell at a low price. This ammo is OK for getting on paper but not suitable for accuracy testing. The price is attractive for insuring the firearm goes bang but any serious accuracy work should be done with higher quality ammunition. The common calibers are easy. Win- A damaged barrel crown is ruinous to accuracy. chester White Box USA brand in .223 and .308 are an excellent resource for checking accuracy as is Winchester’s Silvertip JSP rifle loads.

I often use my own proven handloads, most often using the Nosler Partition for best accuracy. In some calibers such as the 6.5 x 55 Swiss or the 7mm–08 there is no generic equivalent. We have to use first class match grade loads for checking the most accurate

The locking lugs have proper contact and the bolt glides relatively smoothly in the receiver. Having on hand other rifles of the proper screw length helps determine proper length. rifles. A resource I use for super consistent match grade loads is Setpoint ammunition. When you are testing a two thousand dollar rifle—and a two thousand dollar rifle is below the middle of the road for a custom rifle—then good match grade ammunition is a must.

Give Setpoint the specifi cs of your accuracy load and they will load it up for you and save you time at the loading bench. Another problem that crops up is a rifle without sufficient locking lug contact. This type of problem will reduce a custom rifle from a tack driver to a rack grade rifle. The problem is easily checked once you suspect the locking lugs on the rifle are not making sufficient contact and the fix requires lapping the lugs that do contact until they all bear evenly.

Examining the lugs under magnifi cation often shows a worked area where the lugs are in contact or an area with no wear on a lug that does not contact upon locking. You may smoke the bolt to check for contact to be certain your diagnosis is correct. Lap the rear of the lug that is in contact until the others ease into place. When performing this fix realize that working with the bolt lockup may create excess headspace.

Before beginning be certain that you are prepared to set the barrel back if needed, however, with careful lapping of the locking lugs the process should not produce excess headspace. It is not worn and locks the bolt to the receiver properly. This is a modern extractor for the Winchester 70 from Williams Rifle Company. Bedding A warped stock due to improper bedding is a common problem. The Ruger M77 is possibly my favorite modern rifle as I like the Mauser extractor claw and the ruggedness of the Ruger action.

However, in my experience, it is almost an even bet there will be too much stock contact on the forend with these rifles. It is almost like a custom knife delivered with an edge almost sharp enough but not quite leaving the owner to finish the job up.

This is a relatively uncommon tip off mount for the Savage 99 rifle. It is an even bet that the wear and tear on such a special mount is greater than that of standard mounts. These types should be checked often for tightness. This one is too tight. Take apiece of cardstock, such as a match book cover or business card, and check the forend for free floating. If the card does not slip under the barrel and over the stock then the barrel is not free floated correctly.

Proper bedding is pretty straightforward and a bit of study to rule out potential problems is always to your advantage. An inexperienced gunsmith or home tinkerer attempting a bedding job may fail to apply release agent to the receiver or doesn’t to fi ll in the receiver cuts with clay to prevent the receiver filling with epoxy. Looking for these types of flaws may reveal problems when correcting a problem rifle. Another potential problem is bedding in rifle with along heavy barrel.

The bull barrel is very popular and certainly delivers good accuracy. As an example, the single most accurate non-custom rifle I own is a heavy barrel Howa 1500 in .223 Remington. Bedding a such a barrel-heavy rifle can be an exercise in frustration as the thick barrel tends to make the receiver dip under its weight and you must control this orientation during the bedding process. There is away to achieve good results in spite of a heavy barrel. First, disassemble the rifle.

Bedding a heavy barrel rifle begins with applying release agent to any part of the barrel that will contact the stock. Next, apply bedding material to the tip of the forend and about three inches ahead of the rifle receiver. Remember, the barrel must be in contact with this bedding when the forend screw is tightened down so be certain adequate bedding material is used. The two pedestals will be about one and one half inches in diameter respectively.

With the bedding in place return the barreled action to the stock and tighten the action screws as you normally would. If any of the material is forced out of the stock, trim it now before it settles. Once the bedding material is hard disassemble the rifle again. This yields support for the barrel. In any bedding job be certain to not affect how the receiver sets in the stock. Remove wood from under the receiver as needed. When done carefully this relieves contact with the receiver and ammunition magazine box.

With this done, apply receiver bedding as the instructions dictate, allow to harden, disassemble the rifle again and cut away the support pillars for the barrel. The barrel is now free floating and you have superior bedding without fretting about the heavy barrel tilting the receiver during the process. This process has a few more steps than might be necessary with a lighter barrel but this works with bull barrels and does not require several tries to get the bedding job done right.

Naturally, if you wish to work up a fully-bedded barrel the barrel bedding is done first. Pillar Bedding Pillar bedding, in basic terms, replaces the moveable, changeable wood with an inert synthetic material. This solves most bedding problems. Forends may still warp and the stock may twist but wood warping concerns as well as the compressibility of synthetic stocks are reduced by pillar bedding. Work with pillar bedding begins as a standard bedding job.

The full pillar bedding process deserves a report all of its own and we will provide that at a later date. This article has given you some insight into the standard procedure for checking rifle accuracy and common problems. I hope that it has been a help and will keep those hair pulling moments to a minimum. AG