Thread: Causes of accuracy in a rifle

Originally Posted by zarathustra

Aside from the shooter and rest, what of the below elements contributes the most to accuracy in a rifle?:

Action
Barrel
Bedding
Bullet
Stock
Trigger

Assuming you are talking about modern rifles with modern designs and reasonably well made parts, that is anything made in Europe, North America, and Japan, then:

* Action plays a relatively minor role. All modern rifles have good enough action. High end single short actions still makes a difference but that difference will not be noticeable before you have a good barrel. People often put a custom barrel on a factory action to get good results. For example, Shilien makes barrels that can be installed into a Savage action by any average shooter, and it is a popular upgrade for many savage owners in the States (oddly, no one seems to do it here). alsmo many people put Lilja barrels on CZ 455 actions. The contrary is not true. No one puts a factory barrel on a custom action. I have never seen a Ruger factory barrel on a Volquarsen or KIDD action, for example. quite simply it would have sucked just the same.

* Barrel plays a major role. Not all modern rifle makers make equally accurate barrels. Quality of blanks, method of making of the rifling, precision of fitting , lapping the barrel all makes a difference -
- You will see that some guns makes and custom barrel makers advertise the material of their barrels, or that they use well known branded blanks.
- super custom barrels make rifling by cut rifling, it is slow and expensive, but you can make rifling of any twist rate and number of grooves. Rifling of most mass produced modern barrels are hammer forged. It is relatively less precise and less accurate method. It also introduces stress to the metal. Tikka is the only one that makes consistently accurate hammer forged barrels. Button Rifling is the middle ground. It results in more accurate barrels than hammer forge. Custom barrel makers tend to use button rifling, for example Lilja, Trueflight, and Shilen. Savage is the only mass production maker that uses button rifling.
- In terms of barrel fitting, thread fit is generally better than press fit. Press fit can be very good too - if super tight tolerance. Anschutz uses press fit and wins more Olympic gold medal than everyone else combined. Cheap Remingtons also press fit their barrels and they are apparently pretty bad.
- Lapping barrels makes the bore smooth and shiny, the bullet travel through the barrel uniformly and consistently, improving accuracy. But to do this right it has to be done by hand and it is time consuming and therefore costly. This is similar to high end knife makers always sharpen by hand while mass produced knives just get grinded. I think CZ is the only factory rifle maker that hand laps their barrels, which is probably why it has enjoyed a reputation for accuracy. Lilja hand laps every barral. True flight only hand lap their highest grade barrels.

* Bedding is a controversial topic. I personally think that bedding is similar to action in terms of how much it affects accuracy. Most modern rifles has good enough bedding. Most Tikka with plastic stock and no bedding can do 1 MOA easy. Some modern rifles use alternative method to achieve better stock / action surface rigidity. For example, Savage has been doing this aluminium action/stock fitting thing that they call accu-stock and it is fitted in most of their rifles with cheap plastic stock.

* Bullet makes a big difference, especially between the bulk ammo or mil surplus ammo and proper high end ammo or hand loads. An Olympic grade single shot shooting Winchester 555 pack will be out-shot by a CZ452 shooting Eley Ten-x.

* Stock to me ranks below bedding and action. I feel most people upgrade stocks for better customization, or lighter weight, or better carrying ergonomics, or aesthetics rather than inherent accuracy improvement.

* Trigger ranks above barrel in accuracy impact for free hand shooting. I do free hand shooting 95% of the time. Personally I shoot far better with a super light trigger and average barrel than i would with a super accurate barrel and average heavy trigger. But if you shoot off a bipod, then trigger makes less of a difference once it is below a certain threshold. For example, I think going from 7 pound to 3 pound would make a much bigger difference than from 3 pound to 1 pound.

A great comprehensive reply Ultimitsu...the exact information I was looking for.

Cheers

I don't think you can answer the question properly without a little more context, are we talking a rifle that already shoots well but want to improve upon, a custom build from the base up or a rifle that doesn't shoot well.

A rifle with either; poor bedding, crap barrel, crap action or bad ammo will not shoot well.
A un-ergonomic stock or crap trigger can be overcome but the above factors cannot.

If you have a rifle that shoots well but you are wanting to squeeze more accuracy from it, the first thing to do is always hand loading ammo.
99% of the time a good hand load will out shoot factory ammo.

A lot of rifles come out with good barrels these days and in many cases you don't need to replace the factory barrel for the rifle too shoot well but that doesn't mean the rifle wont shoot better with a custom barrel. Tikkas are well known for having good barrels and being accurate right out of the box, but in the USA it's pretty common for guys to rebarrel them with a quality custom barrel and the accuracy does improve along with the velocity as it's common for Tikka factory barrels to produce lower velocities that other barrels.

Some rifles respond well to being glass bedded or but in an aftermarket stock but these days it seems less common, or at least is required less often.
It's very common for folk to replace the stock on target rifle with a chassis that has a built in bedding block, majority of the time this is done for ergonomic reasons or for attaching bipods and other shooting aids that help them to shoot better. Often they get increased accuracy but it's not always a given.

So in the absence of any context and assuming there is no factor that is bad, I'd place things in this order to improve accuracy;
Hand loading
Re-barrel
Bedding
Action

Stock and trigger are both last with the caveat they don't effect the mechanical accuracy of the rifle but in many ways will make a rifle easy or difficult to shoot well.
Thus if I had a rifle that shot well already but wanted to improve, I'd do it in this order.

Hand load
Stock with bedding block
Trigger
Barrel
Action

I remember seeing a video years back. It was somewhere in Russia, a long range gong competition shoot I think. There were guys with flash 4WDs and very expensive looking rifle/scope setups.

Up rocks this rough as russian, he had a swagger about him that suggested regular force guy with a lot of experience (or maybe more). He pops out one of those $10 foldup picnic stools, and has a Baikal IZH 18 with a long legged bipod. Don't think the scope was anything to flash. Anyway this guy absolutely cleaned up.

I tried to find the video but it's got a russian title, so didn't have much luck. It always impressed me as it showed that a consistent shooter with a good shooting style can such a difference.