What do they mean when they say floating barrel? I'm not very knowledgeable on weapons and wonder what this does for kick, price, accuracy...?

floating means the barrel does not touch the forearm part of the stock. To check this you should be able to slide a dollar bill in between the barrel and stock.

I think this means making shure that the barrel doesnt touch the stock (forearm) for reasons of vibration and resonation transfering to the barrel whilst the bullet is traveling down the groves uninterupted. But, you might ask someone like James B, he seems to be a guru with all things rifle. Now with bar-b-que, I might be better than he! EJ

what mossy said. It makes the gun more accurate,so they say...But if you try to shave the forestock down yourself be carefull,use a greese stick or powder to see were the barrel is touching,then slowly remove material utill there is no barrel to stock contack.....Take off too much and you will be buying a new stock...

Have had bad luck with out of the box Remington Model 700s, of which i have several. They would shoot great groups to zero. Then six months or a year later the stock had warped and it still shot great groups to a different zero. This calls for floating the barrel.

The barrels on most my bolt action rifles are floated. Have floated the barrels and glass bedded the actions of acouple dozen bolt action rifles.i just get inthe barrel channelwith an inletting tool and scrape away until iti can get a business card between the barrel and stock.The accuracy of every rifle iever floated the barrel on was improved-except one. That one liked some upward pressureon the barrel near the forend tip. It is really easy to do.

I agree with alsagr. I usually do the action also when free- floating the barrel. Generally, some special attention is needed in the recoil lug area also. I usually solid-bed the first 1 1/2 "-2" of the barrel, and free-float the rest. Be sure to seal up the barrel channel with somesort of spray epoxy or the like to keep moisture from entering the raw wood in the forearm.

Check out this article it explains it better than I can:
http://www.rifleshootermag.com/gunsmithing/bedding_0304/

Thanx for all the info on this...I have a Remington 710 with the synthetic stock, so prolly cant do anything like that to mine, not sure if its worth it for this one. But, wanted to know since I'm looking at purchasing another rifle and had heard about this.

Good article - this exactly mirrors my experience with bedding. Also why most of my personal rifles wear H-S Precision stocks.