BoydAllen
Gold $$ Contributor
A few years back, a friend who does his own work, but has not single pointed action threads, barreled up a short action Remington in ..204 Ruger for a varmint rifle. It gave him nothing but grief, and he ended up trying more than one expensive barrel to get the accuracy that he was looking for, that he had gotten from his other rifles, that were barreled in varmint calibers, and suitably stocked. The action face had been squared, the bolt sleeved, lug contact attended to, but he still could not get the results that he was looking for. Finally, he did a test by putting a piece of stock (not stainless) in his three jaw, and turning a false tenon that he fitted as closely as possible, to his action threads, with a shoulder to tighten against. Then he screwed the action on till it touched and noted to his chagrin that there was a gap on one side with it touching on the opposite side. At that point he got together with a friend who made an action holding sleeve, so that he could align the action with its bolt bore CL coaxial with the CL of the lathe headstock using a closely fitting mandrel. He then recut the action threads with a boring bar. Those threads were so cocked that he had to open them up .025 to get them to fully clean up. After that, my friend cut the tenon off of his latest .204 barrel and refit it to the action, and immediately saw a difference in performance. Perhaps if the misalignment of the threads had not been so extreme he could have gotten away with simply cutting the tenon threads with a sloppy fit so that the barrel shoulder could have seated squarely on the action face, but in this particular case, that would not have been possible. The fellow that recut the the threads for him, has built lots of good shooting rifles without recutting threads, and so my friend had thought that that would not be an issue, in this case he was wrong. I guess my point is that given the total cost of building a complete rifle, why would you risk handicapping it with an action problem? Yes, you might get away with it, but if you did not, the cost of going back and fixing it afterwords would be much greater than dong it right the first time. Also, the answer to the question depends on the accuracy goals of the owner, and the other limitations that he has as far as getting the most out of his equipment. It is very common for me to see fellows that have thrown a lot of money into a project, who do not want to do what it takes to really load and shoot up to the potential of a very good rifle. They they seem to think that by buying a rifle of the highest quality, in an accurate caliber,that the accuracy will be a given, with poorly developed loads, a shaky bench, lousy rest and bags, and no flags. Good luck with that.
