My brother and myself just purchased a couple of the Savage MkII TR rifles in 22lr on Saturday at D*&S sporting goods. Very nice looking little rifles and comfortable stocks and for only $400 bones how could you go wrong, with all the great things people are saying about Savage rifles lately? Well let me tell you, things can go really wrong! After getting the rifles home we did a good cleaning on them, didn't notice any glaring problems. My brother took his out of the stock and adjusted his trigger a little, I left mine at the factory spec for the time being. We then bought a decent set of Leupold rings and went to mounting a couple Weaver V24 scopes on them. Our plan was to use these as our training rifles and shoot some of the 22lr competitions that our club is just beginning to sponser where they really don't want us using our Anschutz rifles.
To get to the point of all this, neither of these rifles could be zeroed, in fact not even close! With the windage cranked all the way to the right, at 35yrds the rifles still shot over 12in left! (both rifles) These scopes have +/- 20" of windage at 100yds and the rifles were still this far off at only 35yds! I can only believe the factory bases that came with these rifles are mis-drilled, problem is we ran a lapping bar across the rings and they look perfect in terms of alignment. Starting to think maybe the barrel is set in the receiver wrong, we really have no idea at this point.
We thought these rifles were going to be fun projects and fun to shoot, turns out we were wrong. These were the first Savage rifles either of us have purchased and we buy our share of new rifles. Looks like we're about to get some experience with not only Savage rifles, but with Savage customer service as well.