Perhaps the thread is cold, but I thought I might contribute something.
Over the years I have spent many thousands of dollars on components and elite gunsmiths to make benchrest, varmint hunting, and 1000 yard competition rifles for me. I have owned one Remington rifle that was a real hummer. The others were decent deer rifles, or tomato stakes, but not suited to much else.
Why? Miserably out of tolerance: bad chambers, bad throats, bad bolts, bad alignment, bad barrels. Sloppy work. Why do I know that? Because I paid a very good gunsmith to measure dimensions, runout and other tolerances. If you bought a car with the same poor tolerances as a Remington factory rifle, you would call it a lemon. Totally unacceptable by modern standards. All these problems can be corrected, of course, by a really good gunsmith (there aren't many around) and a top-quality barrel, stock and trigger. But you will find, just as I and most long-time benchrest competitors do, that making a winning rifle out of a Rem 700 is equivalent to making the proverbial silk purse out of a sow's ear. As one gunsmith told me, "If want to win at Indy, you don't start with a Ford F150."
Talk with a benchrest gunsmith that produces rifles that consistently win internationally and ask him what he typically does to build an accurate rifle using a Rem 700 rifle. Then ask him how much money it costs, and how long the waiting list is. Oh, and while your at it, make sure to notice that only three components of the original rifle will remain when he is done: the bolt, the action body, and the recoil lug; everything else is garbage.
If you can do math, you will learn that, in the case of tactical shooting, for the cost of purchasing a Rem 700 and blueprinting it, you could purchase a Tikka or a Sako or an Accuracy International product that will be ready to go out of the box. Why do I know that? Because I've done it. These manufacturers realized long ago that men that really know how to shoot are going to be using and comparing their rifles, so they hold tight tolerances and assemble good components, something Remington hasn't bothered to do for 25 years. Of course, you will need to develop loads for it and learn how to shoot it on your own.
That said, most people, and that includes many military and LE snipers, can't shoot well enough to tell the difference. I know because I have have shot against them in competition. At a thousand yards, the shooter's ability to dope wind and read mirage are many times more critical than the MOA accuracy of the rifle. Of course, even if you can dope the wind and read mirage, and even if you do have 1/32" MOA ammo, a 1" MOA rifle will still make you miss at 1000 yards. You must have all three legs of the accuracy tripod (rifle, ammo, ability) well in hand.
So you can experience the waste and frustration that many shooters, including me, did by attempting to build an accurate rifle out of a cheap $16 Remington (that's how much Remington spends, or used to spend, to make a bolt-action rifle pre-CNC), or you can save your money and time and get a good rifle to begin with and spend the time and money saved working up loads and learning how to shoot the thing.
I would say "that's my 2 cents," but it cost me a helluva lot more than 2 cents to learn this.
Stan
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Originally Posted by jhferero
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