All,
I am building my wife a savage 110 with Apache gunworks 7mm-08 barrel (which just came in and looks great!). This is all going on a boyds custom laminate stock cut to her size. The whole rig is quite small and perfect for her. Anyways, I threw the new barrel on yesterday. The old stock barrel was free floated the entire way to the barrel nut. The new barrel is free floated up until about 1inch in front of the barrel nut. This Gun will ONLY be used to 300 yards on deer (most likely will never see past 200 yards but we do have 1 field stand that has a 280 yard shot). We would like this rifle to be close to 1MOA.
My question is...would you go out and see how the rifle shoots, in its current form, without free floating all the way to the nut AND without pillarbedding the rifle. If it shoots well now, will it shoot well in the winter where it counts most? OR Should I just pillar bed and free float right now. Keep in mind I have only bedded one other rifle (skim bedded technically) and it already had an aluminum bedding block which did not need pillars. The bedding job came out decent but not great. Hers would be a bit more complicated and makes me nervous. I do not want to hurt her rifle and there are NO gunsmiths around to bed rifles.

Thoughts?