6.5x284 LRH question

[Westcliffe01]

Brent, if you are happy to pony up $1000 for a "top end" rifle that is marketed as a "Long Range Hunter" and then are OK with a MANUFACTURING DEFECT, plain and simple, then I am sure that there are plenty of arms factories that would be happy to churn them out for you.

Even a $300 rifle is not supposed to have chatter marks in the bore. How do you suppose chatter helps with the gas seal on the base of the bullet ? Do you imagine that when measuring a chattered region, should one measure to the peak or the valley of the chatter ? A barrel with chatter fails dimensional compliance just to begin with. Do you want the barrel to act like a file and shave copper off every bullet, which then potentially gets vaporized by the hot gas, only to be re-deposited all over the surface of the barrel in the cooler section ?

Chatter has many causes, but the primary one is the lack of preventative maintanence on the tooling, lack of statistical process control regarding how many bores one should make with a button before switching it out, lack of visual inspection on the part of the workers, failure by management to empower workers to stop the line if they recognize a problem and greed in trying to get every last possible barrel run with each consumable tool without considering quality.

When companies like Remington and Savage sell enough rifles that they KNOW FULL WELL have these defects in them, then they tend to develop a rather cocky attitude about it too, which has emerged with the LRH series of rifles. I have yet to hear of Savage replacing a barrel with these defects in them, despite the rifles being listed for over $1000. The feedback has generally been that it is "good enough". BS !

The first and most important part on the rifle is the barrel. Anyone wanting to market reliable long range rifles has to start there. Its not as if the rest of the rifle has any special magic to make it work better than others half the price. But exactly on this one fundamental component Savage is failing miserably. I have so far had only 1 factory gun that has shot well, and that is my 10PC. But I'm starting to think that was a fluke. My model 12 stainless 243 was so so (1moa at best), my latest model 93 in 22wmr was 4MOA when I got it and is now about 2MOA after bedding the action in the cluster for an inletting job that they did. Rem 700 Classic in 8x57 ($800 new) was a 5MOA gun. TC Icon in 308 was a 3moa gun and copper fouled like crazy (chatter issues).

So far I have 3 rifles converted to Shilen select match barrels and all are 1/2MOA or better. I have a 4th with a CBI barrel in 6.5x284 that I have not yet fired. The shilen barrels have no copper fouling issues, thats what one expects for a hand lapped barrel.

For the reasons I have stated, I no longer buy a factory rifle, except with the deliberate thought that it is a donor to put a custom barrel onto. Of course 95% of gun buyers shoot min of pipe plate at best and as we can see from the manufacturers habits, its those people that they care about. They know that if they continue fingering their nose at us, we will go away and buy used rifles as donors or buy custom actions to avoid the aggravation.

I don't know about this barrel chatter issue, what is the issue with it?

We have a few rifles with chatter in the groove. All shoot sub .5 MOA or better and it doesn't take a lot to get under 1 MOA. My buddies 260 with factory ammo shot 1 MOA, hand loads is .3. My 6.5-284 has always been hand loaded and I can get .20 to .5 with different loads and bullets.