You could easily toss the mzl brake and the rifle would be quite user friendly yet. And heck of a lot more user friendly on the old ears.
Man, I wouldn't remove that brake.
I had a 700 XCR in .338 RUM for a short while. Only thing I ever owned that exceeded my tolerance. The recoil on the shoulder was not bad, but I simply could not work a scope/base setup that would keep the scope from clocking me in the forehead. I scootched it forwards, backwards, higher, lower, no difference. Never drew blood, but after two - three _solid_ whacks on the noggin I start to flinch. The final shot I fired from it was from leaning up against a post with my left hand with the gun rested over my left arm. Hit the 8" wide, 6" tall plate at 300 yards but the scope hit me in the head so hard I had to go straight to the chiropractor, knocked my atlas joint out and went from happy as a clam to migraine-type crawl-n-puke headache in about 2 seconds flat.
Maybe it's just me, I crawl a stock real bad. Or maybe the R3 pad is too squishy and lets the gun come back too far. But I just couldn't get far enough away from the scope.
Got rid of that gun ... or, gettin' rid of it, consignment. Earnest money has been paid, it's going to happen and it won't be any too soon for me.
Love the external ballistics of the .338 RUM, and the Edge would be a bit better yet, but like Clint said, a man's gotta know his limitations.
Tom
