ORIGINAL: Swampdog
How is everybody? Was at a local shop the other day looking at some scopes. Got to talking to some of the regular hang arounds .The question of cross bolts came up.I told the guy's that you don't normally have to have a special wrench to remove the bolt because it is there to keep the wood from splitting .That a gun with to cross bolts has one at the recoil lug and the other back around the action screws.Anyway one guy was talking about taking his gun apart.When he did another old guy almost had a coniption he went to ranting about "don't ever remove the action from the stock".He thenwent on to talk about a Sako in PPC that a guy took apart that was shooting sub 1/4 " groups ,after they took it apart it would not shoot a group.Thery were so adamant about it they have almost scared the hell out of me.I know some guns are funny about the toruqe of the screws but this is just to much.what do you guy's think?
I cannot entirely agree with the notion that one should NEVER take the barreled-action out of the stock. But after doing so, and putting the contaption back together, it may take a number of rounds to "resettle" the action & barrel back to the point that they are once again shooting as they were before being taken down. For example, in the days when the U.S. Army marksmanship Unit was using National Match M1's, they NEVER field-stripped the rifles for cleaning like tyhe rest of the Army did after a day at the range. The reason was that to do so disturbed the delicate relationship of the reciever group and the steel bedding of the stock. Resettling a National Match M1 required AT LEAST 20 rounds before the rifle was back to shooting small groups.
It also seems to me that if you take a bolt-action rifle apart, the point of impact, or even the grouping ability might possibly suffer unless all screws are retorqued to the same pressure as beforethe disassembly. This might apply particularly to the Ruger M77 due to the "down and back" action of the front guard screw.
I once had a TCR single-shot in .243 WIN that was starting to scattr its shots all ove the place. i removed the rubber buttplate, and found that the stocjk thru-bolt was slightly loose. I retightened it to what I thought was reasonable. Loand behold! Groups were back to where they had been before the problem showed up!!