H & S Project Rifle Part 5 – In search of accuracy.
To put it bluntly, the accuracy of the Remington SPS out of the box, was a huge disappointment. I expected much more from this brand of rifle in this calibre. Not to worry! These things can be easily fixed. Just add time and money. Pictured below is the modified rifle ready for accuracy testing.
First in the quest for acceptable accuracy was the trigger. As it came from the factory is was way too heavy for my liking. So with a few modifications to the trigger and it was breaking at a crisp 2 pounds. I used an accurate chain pull to set the weight of pull.
Once modified and adjusted the trigger was very good for a hunting rifle and turned out to be much better than I thought would be possible. I had budgeted for a new trigger, but in the end, it was not needed.
With regard to the stock, I had three options. First try and pillar bed the original plastic stock. Second use a H-S Precision stock that I had spare. Or third buy a new replacement stock.
As it was, Boyd’s was having an “on line” sale and I managed to obtained this laminate sporter stock for US$50 plus US$45 postage, delivered into Australia. The H-S Precision stock might have yielded better accuracy with its built in bedding block system but the sporter stock would be more in keeping with the nature of this rifle.
So rather than put on the bulkier Varmint style H-S Precision stock, I decided to sacrifice a bit of accuracy potential in the name of weight saving and better handling .
At this stage I wanted to see how the rifle would shoot without any fancy epoxy bedding job. So I simple used my Dremel to sand out the fore end barrel channel to make the rifle barrel fully free floating.
Having the barrel free floating is a much better system than the factory plastic stock with its full contact at a number of different places along the barrel.
With little a bit of work, the Laminate stock was now perfectly inletted to accept the barreled action and bottom metal. I then torqued down the action screws to 45 in/lb front and 30 in/lb rear.
Once assembled it was time to load up a few rounds and see if these few modifications had made any difference to this rifles accuracy.
Shooting the rifle with the new stock was a completely different experience. The Plastic stock felt like I was holding onto a snake as it flexed and twisted under recoil. While the Laminated Boyd’s stock felt rock solid as it came back straight and sooth in the sand bags. I am sure that this helped accuracy greatly.
I tried the same loads as I had tried previously plus a few additional loads that I thought might work well. As you can see from the photo below the improvement is staggering. Groups have shrunk considerably and with some more load development work I am sure that this rifle will live up to the full accuracy potential of the 7mm Remington Magnum.
While the rifle was at the range, I put the Bushnell 6500 scope through a few tests to check its turret adjustment. This scope is a 2.5-16x power scope with Mil Dot reticle. As I will be using this scope to dial up for long range shooting, it is important that its adjustments are reliable and predictable.
As it turned out there was about 5% error in the elevation adjustment over its useful range. This meant that if I dialed 30 MOA I actually got 31.5 MOA on the target. This 5% was consistent so can be easily compensated for with a small adjustment to the chronographed velocity or B.C. Not a problem.
In the future I may epoxy bed the action, install pillars and do some more load development work. But how accurate does a field hunting rifle need to be? With the rifle shooting as well as it is. I think it is time to simply load up some more ammo. Then get out into the field and see what she can do.
Related posts:
- H & S Project Rifle part 4 – First shots.
- H & S Project rifle part 2 – Fitting the Picatinny rail
- 2010 HUNT & SHOOT Project Rifle – 7mm Rem Mag. Part 1
Category: Articles, Norman Nelson's Column
