Links,
Have no idea who his smith is. I do however know who he is! Well about 95% sure who he is.
I would agree, if your building a rifle specifically for BR shooting, its not overly hard to build a rifle to shoot into the .1's.
I believe he was referring to his big game rifles however and to build a big game rifle chambered in an extreme performance big game chambering that will shoot into the .1's is much more challanging.
Now if your big game rifle is a 15 lb rifle chambered in a 6mm PPC, I conceed, there should be no reason why it will not shoot extremely well. For me, a rifle chambered in a chambering such as a 7mm AM that will hold 1/2 moa or even 3/4 moa out to 1000 yards for three shots in good conditions impresses me MUCH more then a rifle chambered for a small chambering that will shoot into the .1's at 100 yards. Just the game I prefer to play personally.
Anyway, This is the guy I think he is, he has been proven to stretch a thing or two concerning the truth to make his point seem more authoritative when it really is not. He is trying to come off as an innocent contributor to this post, that is hardly the case, and I knew it as soon as I read his first post. That is why I replied as I did. I would give one of my rifles to have the chance to witness groups fired with all his 0.1 rifles. I have locals all the time, many of whom are BR shooters that tell me they have rifles that shoot into the .1's all the time. They tell me this because they expect every rifle built for them to shoot as well as these rifles. I tell them that I offer a 1/2 moa accuracy potential and ask them to bring up their rifles and shoot them on paper at my range just because I want to see this quality of rifle. Of the couple dozen guys that have bragged about such rifles, there have only been Three of these that did not do some serious back peddling on the performance of their rifles and did not bring them out to shoot.
The three that did bring their rifles out proved what I suspected. Yes the rifles shot very well, no doubt there, but not one consistantly shot better then a 0.4" average. I will also admit that there were a couple 3 shot groups that did shoot into the 0.1's but it was not common. I often hear from customers saying they have rifles that shoot into the .1's and first thing I ask them is what type of rifle do they have. I have yet to see a legit big game rifle that would shoot "Consistantly" into the .1's.
The key word here is "Consistantly". Not once in a while or the rifle once shot a 0.1" group and from that point on its labeled as a .1" rifle.
I do not say this to detract from any other smith out there. And I am not talking about BR rifles, nor was this post started asking about BR rifles. It was started asking a specific question about information about the AMs which are solely intented to be used as big game rifle for long range big game hunting.
If LightVarmint or whatever name he is now using has rifles that "Consistantly" print into the 0.1's, I highly doubt they are what we out west would consider legit long range big game rifles which is what we were talking about before he added his opinion.
Again, if we are talking rifles built for the specific purpose of shooting very tight groups at 100 and 200 yards, sure, this level of accuracy is not suprising but again, that is not the type of rifles we were discussing in any way.
Just because you have a small caliber, low intensity chambering in a moderatly heavy rifle that you shot a deer with, does not mean its a big game rifle by design. Means you have a BR rifle that you used to shoot a deer with. When I refer to "low intensity chambering" I am not referring to the velocity or chamber pressure generated by specific chambering. I am referring to the amount of stress the chambering imposes onto the rifle system. Getting a 222 Rem to shoot VERY well is not all that hard, in fact in many cases I have seen rifles that shot into the .1s chambered in similar chamberings that that had receivers no where near what would be considered square. That WILL Not happen with a large diameter, high intensity chambering. Everything has to be perfect in the rifle to get good results.
Again, is this hard to do, nope, there are alot of good smiths out there that do it all the time. Would they do it with a customer sitting there watching, that is laughable, unless the customer has the better part of a day to put in sitting on his rear waiting!!!
I suspect LightVarmint may have nothing better to do.
Kirby Allen(50)