What are the advantages for a hunting weight rifle between, bare weight of 6-8 lbs?

I assume were talking 700 clones, if your looking to squeeze the every last bit of accuracy out of the rifle than I think a custom action will get you there, scope base holes that are inline with the centerline of the bore and most use the 8-40's which are stronger than factory,

Some have a better fire control systems with a guided firing pin that when you squeeze the trigger the FP doesn't bounce around behind the bolt face trying to find the hole, this can lead to unexplained flyers as the actions vibrations are not consistant shot to shot,

Some of the better customs are finished machined after heat treat so the action bodies are usally straighter with exceptional tolerances which leads to better accuracy!

Better bolt timing and extraction surfaces..

Some people like the looks
Some like how smooth they feel over a Rem 700

But a 700 with a little work can still be a very accurate hunting rifle!

Ackleyfan is correct but unless all the other components are of equal quality and well fitted the advantages are likely to be minimal.

I think custom actions are easier to get right and be happy with. I think alot of gunsmith truing jobs are smoke and mirrors and who knows may even cause more harm than good to a factory remington. I think if you ever sell the rifle the public interested in buying the rifle also feels whatever truing was done may or may not have been good for the action. there is no standard for truing and not real way to measure it.

a custom action takes all that out of the deal and makes any potential resale value a lot better. with a custom action all the gunsmith needs to do is chamber and thread a barrel. with the proliferation of custom actions we are seeing alot more cottage rifle builders or companies that sell systems that sub out the builds and mark them up heavily. custom actions are allowing much of this to be done with good accuracy.

as for differences most are subtle and some not so, Surgeon and BAT are the only companies who offer a machined in scope rail and recoil lug. I personally think this is a big advantage. at the end of the day spending an extra 2 or 300 hundred on a custom action just ices the cake and adds a second kind of cool to your custom one that you can be proud of and others admire.

If you are building a "from the ground up" custom rifle there may be good reason to use a custom action but that reason won't be improved performance. Instead it will be the perception of increased intrinsic value. Face it, There are several tons of rifles out there which use Remington actions and which are superbly accurate, function flawlessly, and look pretty good doing it.
In other words, I can do all sorts of things to a Remington 700 but it will still not be Stiller or Borden or any other custom.
On the other hand, none of those will ever be a Mauser!
In the world of custom rifles there is a sharp division between those custom rifles which are essentially an assembly of custom parts and those which are a product of custom altered/ built/ refined parts and handmade components. In the first example, a custom action might be considered to be a major boon. In the second example, it is the work of the maker which is valued and an action which is re-worked by some makers might be highly desirable. GD

Bragging rights!!!!


Mike

For me, easy access to very good lefthanded actions seems to be swaying me. Why look forever and invest hours of my time when I could just order one in lefty? Plus not many lefty 223 bolts for example on factory rigs. I do have some exceptionally nice builds on lefty 700s though and am just now considering running a custom.

Here are a few more traits of some custom actions not mentioned:

Some of the custom offerings like Surgeon or Stiller offer larger actions with magazines large enough to fit cases like the RUM or 338 Lapua or even a chey-tac with enough space in the magazine for seating VLD style bullets. Some have integral picatinny rails. The bolt bodies are also larger with more steel around the case head. To me those customs fit a niche that an altered Rem or Win action cannot fullfill.

I got a few custom actions, they are almost as good as a Savage action. Sometimes simple, ugly and sloppy are better than complex, pretty and precise. Got a supply of cheap savage parts, a whole rack of them. So, I'll take mass produced, easily interchangeable, no sweat fitting (every part of the Savage is adjustable) and sufficiently accurate.

Cobbled a Savage Target Action together last year with a Pac-Nor polygonal barrel that shoots the 40 grain Nosler .224 lead free bullet into a .206" bug hole. Killed so many sage rats the stink of death was overpowering. It's how it functions - rifles are tools like hammers. Sure cured my custom action addiction.

One of the things I'd like to comment on is the common perception that 8-40 screws are stronger than 6-48's. More than one engineer has told me this isn't true, because the larger threads on the 8-40's reduce the diameter of the screw at the bottom of the threads. The one real advantages of 8-40's is that slightly off-center 6-48 holes can be re-drilled to 8-40 to fix the problem.

Personally, I'd rather have an action with built-in bases than either, but have fired a lot of rounds from hard-kicking rifles with scope mounts "only" attached with 6-48 screws with nary a problem.

Some custom actions do have nice features. The Montana 1999, for instance, is a combination of the best features of the 98 Mauser and pre-'64 Model 70, and comes in a left-hand version. The Ultra Light Arms action is very precise yet very strong, and precisely made from the ground up. Melvin Forbes once told me that one of the reasons he started making them was all the time it spent to get a 700 action light and precise. He figured it would be easier to start from the ground up, and it turned out he was right.

That said, I have a pile of rifles built on various commercial actions from 700's to FN Mausers, and am just as satisfied with those as the rifles on special actions.