Freefloating

[L. Cooper]

Honest "minute of angle" hunting rifles are a lot fewer and farther between than appears on boards such as this. In a standard sporter type rifle used for hunting big game, 1" groups are just not important.

However, I do free float all the barrels of my rifles. It has seriously helped accuracy in a couple, done nothing I could measure to a few, and seriously hurt the accuracy of one which I sold after I put the pressure back with fiberglass.

So I don't do it for accuracy. The reason I do it is that I find the point of impact changes far less with floated barrels. I like wooden stocks, and it seems to me that floated barrels are less prone to point of impact changes due to extreme temperature and moisture changes. I live in Saskatchewan, and my rifles get used in temperatures from over 30 C to below -30 C. Perhaps synthetic stocks would not create problems, but I don't like them, so I think floating wooden stocks makes sense for me.

I also glass bed everything, and that has produced accuracy increases in every rifle I have done it to. Sometimes not very much increase, but it has never hurt any rifle I owned. Bedding is not complicated, but be sure, as Skeet suggests, that you don't end up gluing the action to the stock. I understand that the bench rest competitors think it can make for good accuracy, but I need to take my rifles apart sometimes for cleaning and drying.

I have read about shimming the action with pieces of plastic credit cards to get the barrel floated so you can run a test of what would happen when you actually do the free floating. You can also use the plastic to increase the fore end pressure by sliding a strip under that barrel as an experiment to see what pressure does in your rifle. If more pressure equals better accuracy, maybe free floating isn't a good idea.

I believe Remington applies barrel pressure because their statistics say lots of guns will shoot better with pressure, and it is cheaper to produce guns with pressure than with free floated barrels. I think most free floated and glass bedded rifles will be more consistent (I didn't say accurate) than the standard stock Remington.