Forum shooting challenge: The under 500 500

[ChrisW]

I am not sure why you would rubbish Rimfire Central. Look at the size:
* This forum - Threads: 47,083, Posts: 782,521, Members: 7,998
* Rimfire Central - Threads: 473,223, Posts: 5,000,803, Members: 154,084

Rimfire Central is generally speaking a very respected forum, well run and well moderated. I mention RC because the RC has a lot of people tinkering with rifles about the price range referred to in this thread. If you go to Snipers Hide - a long ranger shooter forum - people there tend to talk about 5k rifles and 5k scopes.

I am not sure why you think somehow centre fire rifles are "mostly hand made by craftsman" with "More work went into the bolt than your average rimfire." The average rimfire that people over at RC play with are CZ and Ruger, they both between 600 to 900 here in NZ. many people there have been long term Anschutz class users.

Check out a review for a typical low-end centre fire gun, the infamous Remington 770: https://www.huntinggearguy.com/rifle...on-770-review/

Yeah.. I think CS 453 has more work gone into its trigger than Remington has put into the whole gun.

I think the point being made re the "mostly hand made by craftsman" comment is that most of the rifles that will be real contenders in this event will be old guns, that date back to a time where each rifle had a much higher degree of manual machining, hand fitting, and workmanship put into it. As such many of these now cheap, old rifles have a much higher degree of craftsmanship and quality then would be found on a comparably priced new-ish gun.
For say, $400, you can either buy a high quality old gun, or a low quality new gun. IMO, the high quality old gun has much more potential.