Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Why no love for the M70 Lightweights?

My wife hunts with an M70 Classic Compact. It's not a "Lightweight" per se, but it is a sweet little rifle nonetheless. I installed a pad to lengthen the LOP. It has a 20-inch barrel that is contoured like a featherweight.

I don't hear much about the Classic Compacts. My guess is that the short factory LOP (12.5" IIRC) placed it in the youth niche and few were sold. I would love to have one in 7-08.

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Here is mine. It too is a Classic Compact SA (short action) chambered in .308. I use it with with 180 grain Nosler Partitions for Deer and it works beautifully. Carries like a dream.



If you don't like winchesters, another lightweight is to use a g.33/40 just as they come. they are light to carry and shoot just as well as a .308 if you reload for them.

Here are a couple of mine sans stocks.

That is a beautiful rifle. Why havent I seen one of those before? Are they only made in short actions?

The custom compacts were only made with the SA (short action).

But an even shorter action was used for the WSSM line of cartridges. I would imagine that a very good smith could take one of those and do a bit of welding to the bolt face and make one hell of a nice .250 savage out of it, but why would you since the .25 WSSM is available.

The other thing you could do would be to have a smith cut down a mauser action to the size of the cartridge you want. Jim Carmichel of Outdoor Life fame hunted extensively with a .250 Savage that was made on a mauser action that was cut down by Ron Lampert.

Here is what the WSSM action looks like.



and here is what Carmichel's shortened Mauser looks like

I have the exact rifle you wish for and I like it very much. Sorry, it's not for sale!

I don't find the short LOP to be an issue. Up here in the frozen north, we tend to wear lots of clothing in hunting season. I suppose that is like installing a thicker recoil pad to increase the LOP. All I know is that even with my orangutan-length arms the short LOP feels fine.

Two SIMPLE solutions:

1. buy a Kimber 84 which has a far superior handling stock to the
M 70 club.

2. Buy a 700 "ute" (youth) model and add a thick pad to get the LOP you need.

Kimber: