Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Caliber for walk around field rifle/ truck gun

One of the reasons i bought my .308, 16.x Ruger Scout was to have a light, handy carry rifle that could take abuse and function if the scope took a header. It has a 16.1" barrel and I swapped the factory laminate stock for the synthetic one, which Ruger claims brings the weight down to 6.25 pounds.

Velocities are reduced due to the barrel length (an acceptable trade-off in my world for being light and handy). My chronoed velocities are:
2868fps = 130g TTSX/CFE223
2699fps = 150g BT/Varget
2296fps = 208 A-MAX/Varget

Both the 130g TTSX and 150g BT were about .7 MOA loads in the range sessions where those velocities were measured.

Another mod was to remove the factory flash hider and install a $30 muzzle brake I found at a gun show. The point was to test how bad the flash and bang might be if I opted for a Silencerco brake/suppressor adapter as my intent is to do so down the road. The results were the flash and bang increased but not as much as expected and recoil was reduced significantly. My hunting buddy said "there is no recoil", an exaggeration, but he was comparing it to his 7mm RM.

one other thing I did was to purchase a 3-round and 5-round synthetic mags to use in place of the factory supplied steel 10-round nag, which rattles and is obnoxiously long for my current uses. Mostly I just use the 3-round mag, which, by comparison to the others, sits almost flush with the stock.

Next step is to purchase a scout-type scope and mount it in quick-release rings.