Will a round action start to shoot lose with high power rounds

[bigrich954rr]

Ive been told that a round rifle action like the remington 700 will start to shoot lose with a high power round. I have also read it a few places but i cant remember where. Whats the the real deal with this. Did people just bed or pillars the rifles wrong.

[Fiftydriver]

Generally this happens from overtightening the receiver screws on wood stock, even laminated wood stock. When the receiver screws are over tightened, this compresses the wood in the stock putting it under a pressure load. When the rifle is fired and over time, this preload will relax from the break down of the wood from the recoil energy. As a result, the torque on the screws will lessen and the recevier in extreme cases can work loose.

Then in most cases the receiver screws are retorques and it starts the process over again.

Even a correctly skim bedded wood stock can do this if the receiver screws are over tightened, the still will still compress.

Only a properly pillar bedded rifle will prevent this from happening.

The round receivers will act as a wedge and will compress the wood more dramatically then a flat bottom receiver, simply point of force issues here. Not only will a round receiver compress more, it will also seperate the wood causing cracks alone the centerline of the stock.

If pillar bedded properly this is not an issue.

Good Shooting!!

Kirby Allen(50)

[bigiron]

Riding all day on a four wheeler sure will loosen some screws [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] but then you can blame the gunsmith [img]/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smirk.gif[/img]
Blue loctight.

[Bart B]

They sure have. With a .308 Win. using bullets heavier than about 160 grains they would last about 300 rounds before torquing to a bad fit in epoxy bedding. The magnums would last about 100 to 200 rounds. Some military long range rifle teams tried using 2-inch long recoil lugs on their Rem. 700 actions but that didn't help.

Pillar bedding solved virtually all the problems with milder recoiling cartridges but the heavier ones may still work loose a bit. Benchresters started glueing round receivers in flat surfaced sleeves to solve the problem. But I've never seen a pillar/epoxy bedded round receiver shoot as well as a flat side/bottom one conventionally epoxy bedded when heavy bullets are used.

Few people shoot well enough to tell when round receivers work a bit loose in their bedding; let's hope users of this forum do. Accuracy degrades at most about one third to one half MOA when they work loose a bit and torquing the stock screws to the "perfect" amount no longer works.