Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles My first Tikka ... a T3 TAC in .300 Win Mag

A friend had two Tikka T3 rifles on Gunbroker recently and managed to sell the .308 Win fairly quickly. I was at his house this past July 4th and decided to buy the T3 TAC in .300 Win Mag for $1,200 which included an extra magazine. He had quite a few watchers but no bids so I was excited to take it off his hands. He'd only shot 20 rounds through the rifle before deciding that he couldn't afford to shoot it so in the safe it went. He lost his job back in April so has been selling off a bunch of firearms that he doesn't use. I figured that it would make a good all-round hunting/light tactical setup.

The first thing I did was to remove the rear sling swivel stud and install the included "military" sling swivel studs on the left side of the stock. Then I removed the factory 0 MOA rail and ordered an EGW HD 20 MOA rail. I also ordered an AREA 419 Hellfire universal adapter for the M18x1 muzzle threads along with a set of Nightforce Ultralite rings to use with the Nightforce NXS 3-15x50mm F1 scope that's been sitting in the safe for a while. I placed an order with Mountain Tactical for some "factory" aluminum bottom metal that works with the plastic factory magazine, an aluminum bolt shroud and stainless steel recoil lug. The bottom metal and recoil lug will be here next week.



The EGW rail wasn't drilled for the two steel pins in the receiver so I drilled/reamed holes on the underside of the rail this morning using the factory rail as a template. The new rail is nice and snug on the pins so any shearing forces are being resisted by the pins as well as the four #6 mounting screws. The 20 MOA rail gets me 22.5 milrad of vertical adjustment from zero (100 yards) so I can dial out to around 1,700 yards if necessary. Earlier this morning I bore sighted the rifle/scope at 100 yards and then sent two rounds downrange (see first target below). I have 10 or so boxes of Federal Vital-Shok Trophy Copper 180gr ammunition so was hoping that this Tikka would shoot well using that load. I had thoroughly cleaned the barrel a few days ago and patches felt very smooth in the bore so I figured that this was most likely a quality barrel. The first two shots were from a cold/clean bore with the second shot about 3/4" below the first shot.



After making a scope adjustment I shot a 5-round group which is very promising. Average velocity for seven shots was 2,975 fps (LabRadar) with an ES of 30 fps. My first impression of this rifle is that it's incredibly soft shooting for a .300 Win Mag, it feeds, fires, extracts and ejects flawlessly with a very smooth action, and it shoots this factory load very well indeed. I think $1,200 was well worth it for such a good rifle. I've got more than a few quality rifles, some costing way more than this Tikka, but I've never had such a positive first experience with any rifle at this price point. I might have the barreled action and bolt Cerakoted to better protect the rifle from the elements since it has a parkerized finish on the CrMo barrel and receiver. All in all, a great start and I doubt that this will be my last Tikka rifle.

Looks great George. You scored bigly!

You ended up with an outstanding rifle.

Looks like you are going to have some fun

Very Nice

Thanks for the positive feedback. The aluminum bottom metal and stainless steel recoil lug from Mountain Tactical arrived today and were an easy install. The aluminum bolt shroud is on back order. I'll try to stretch it out a bit this week/weekend. I have steel targets at my house at 100, 200, 400, 700 and 1050 yards so I'm interested to see how it does with the Federal load. I'm not into long range hunting so this is more of an "out of interest" test.

Mountain Tactical "factory" bottom metal to replace the plastic part from Tikka.