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educate me on pillar bedding please

What does pillar bedding accomplish? How to find out how long the pillars should be etc ? Best material for the pillars?
 
Steel or Aluminum, pillars mounted to the action then the action is shimmed so the screws heads are just below the stock (forearm) surface. I do mine in two steps. Set the pillars and when set hard, I go back and do between the action and the stock. The action in mounted solid ON THE PILLARS!! YMMV.
 
Years ago, I had a good conversation with George Kelbly about pillar bedding. His experience goes back to when it was first done. Perfectly functioning pillars can be done, cast in place using metal filled epoxy putty, with additional over bedding done to deal with shrinkage. On metal pillars, which are typically aluminum, he said that one of their first discoveries was that rifles shot better with at least a thin skim coat of bedding between the tops of the pillars and the action. Readers might want to remember that this was for the most critical applications, short range group. The last pillar job that I did was a long time back and when I did that I did it in two steps. I installed the pictures in the stock, using the action as a fixture with spacers that would leave the tops of the pillars well below the action so that the final bedding would be of more or less uniform thickness around the action and on top of the pillars. The issue that I was trying to deal with is that all bedding materials have some shrinkage. and if you have hard contact with the pillars in the final bedding, that shrinkage will cause the bedding around where the pillars contact the action very very slightly lower than the top of the pillar, which I did not want. If you want a more authoritative source, you might want to ask Alex Wheeler his opinion on this point.
 

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