Building a precision rifle: Part 1
A dangerous question:
“What would you think about building a dream rifle for me? A ground up, piece by piece designed rifle to shoot really far.”
The whole reason I decided to start this blog, began last February when I was at my Grandpa's funeral. I was talking with my cousins in an ongoing search to find out who had last seen my grandfathers 1894 Winchester 30-30. It was one of the first rifles I shot and while I had no personal interest in owning it, I just wanted to make sure it hadn't gotten lost. In my conversations, my cousins and shared a lot of shooting stories and hunting stories. It got me thinking about how while I still regularly shot pistols and went hunting maybe once a year. I had not really been that regular at shooting with a rifle in many years, a practice that was both for competition and for hunting.
I got to thinking about finding a rifle and getting back into shooting long guns. I sat on the idea and it only really came up again when I would head out to the range to shoot my pistols. But during one trip in the spring, I brought my 30-06 and tore through a box of shells only to have a giant bruise where the recoil crushed me. I started to think how could I shoot at a distance but control for recoil. So I began reading, I went back to people I respected in the precision rifle game who suggested starting from the round I would like to shoot and build your gun around it.
While I hope to write a whole post on building a gun around a specific round; ultimately I kept reading about the 6.5 Creedmoor and I had a chance to shoot a 6.5 Creedmoor using the very high-quality Hornady 140 GR ELD Match round. The velocity of 2710 FPS and trajectory of -1.5 is exactly the same as the Hornady 165 GR 30-06 match rounds. I had used when I have competed in High Power rifle competitions. But unlike the 30-06 round, there is a greater velocity at 500 and 1000 yards.
So once I had a selected a round I was thinking about I started thinking about what kind of gun I wanted to build or buy. I had been looking online at Accuracy International AX platform barreled for 6.5cr and Wilson Combat Super Sniper 6.5 rifles. I had not yet formed an opinion on bolt vs gas gun (something I will share more later on). I just wanted to get something and get shooting.
During a trip home to North Dakota in July, my plan really started to take shape and change towards a ground-up build. I was having coffee with my uncle Marcum, he mentioned that my cousin Lucas had begun building and gunsmithing; he also had been working on precision rifle shooting and reloading. So in Late July, I sent my first email titled "Dream Gun Build". I explained that I wanted to build a rifle to shoot at precision distances and that I had been reading about 6.5 Creedmoor specifically the Hornady round I mentioned above.
In probably the rarest opportunities I had some stock that I had sold and had done way better than I expected so I had a pretty good budget to begin this process. So I started with the question about a dream build and what followed was long emails about triggers, barrels and reticles and shooting styles. I wanted to share what I learned through this process and so my next set of posts is going to be about how we put together a plan and what I learned through the process.