Everyone bear with me on this long post. Last year I purchased a brand new 7mm08 Savage Lady Hunter for my wife. This rifle is very similar to the Savage Light weight hunter series...most importantly to note is it has a wooden stock which does have metal pillars installed from factory which is a plus but it also comes with cheap plastic bottom "metal". My wife and I did the proper barrel break-in procedure and this thing just threw the ugliest groups with all factory loads we tried... 2 to 5inch three shot groups. I did the normal procedure of checking the scope, scope mounts, and bases. Nothing helped. Made sure the barrel is free floated. I changed out the bottom plastic parts for real metal. Nothing seamed to help. I contacted Savage and they had me send the gun in. They sent me it back in 2 weeks with a note stating it passed their quality control and they were able to get a 3 shot 1.5inch group. Even though 1.5inches is still terrible in my book, I would have been happy if I could reproduce that but I simply could not. We tried many different loads (mostly premium loadings) and different shooters to eliminate shooter error. Still could not get under a 1.75in group and I think that was a fluke as most the groups were still in the 3 inch range. At this point I said well it is either the barrel or the rifle stock needs to be fully bedded, not just pillar bedded and since bedding is a PITA and had no guarantee, I decided Id throw a custom barrel on there and if it still shot bad, then id bed it and likely have a very nice shooting rifle. If I bedded it first and needed to rebarrel it, id have to bed it again. Well, the custom barrel finally came in this past week. Put it on yesterday. Went to the range and sighted it in while doing the barrel break in which from this barrel manufacturer is 5-10 single shots with cleaning in between and then five 3 shot groups with cleaning in between. I only had time to do 6 single shots and then two 3 shot groups. Immediately, I knew the rifle was a shooter. The first 3 shot group printed .7 inches. The second one printed similar results. This was with the cheapest ammo I could find since I knew I would be breaking the barrel in and did not care too much about accuracy at this point. I'm sure the barrel will only get better as it continues to settle in. I still like savage rifles, but I will likely never buy a new one again. Ill just look used. For the price of a used one, you can throw a custom barrel on and have yourself a VERY nice shooting rifle for a similar cost of a new one.