Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Single Shots John Barsness' article in Nov Rifle - Ruger #1's

This is a pretty good article, as it mirrors my experience with these seductive rifles. JB indicates that all the various bedding tricks that have been published over the years have less benefit than simply putting on a good barrel.

The photo of the #1V in .22-250 shows a stunning 77 vintage Ruger, which teased me for about two decades - it would often put three into one hole at 100 yards, then toss the next two an inch away. I did most of the tuning tricks that have been published over the years. What finally did the trick was fire lapping with the Wheeler Engineering kit.

If you have a #1 that is finicky, before whittling on wood or metal try the fire lapping approach. It worked well for me.

I've owned about a half dozen Ruger No.1's and every single one of them has had the plainest stocks I've ever seen. Why couldn't I have lucked into one with wood like that?

However, all of mine have been real shooters without any efforts on my part other than load development. My 338 fouls something fierce but is a fine shooter until the fouling builds up too much.

My 458 fouls like a bastard too...rough bore near the muzzle.

I have fooled around with fire-lapping and found it did far more good just in front of the chamber than anywhere else. This is of course a critical area, but if you have a bore that fouls toward the muzzle, fire-lapping doesn't do much good.

Here I've found that wrapping a patch or two around a bore-size brush, then liberally applying lapping compound to the patch and giving the bore 100-200 strokes is a lot more effective. Add another patch when the stroking starts to get too easy. This is a lot faster and cheaper than fire-lapping, and in my experience more effective as well.

MD

I did this lapping trick on a miserably fouling M700, and all it wants to do now is shoot. 40+ rounds and the groups are still tiny. And it was a lot easier than fire lapping.

wouldnt fireing more rds in a sence lap the barrel. bullet going down the bore press fitted gota be smoothing out the roughness with each rd fired

It does, but takes a LOT of rounds. Lapping as described above works a lot quicker, and more cheaply too.

MD

i think id be afraid that id prematurely wear the bore out. it just seems kinda risky.

i couldnt tell you if my 220 #1 fouls easy or not. its gona probly 100rds since its last had bore scrubbed out. i dont mind it being fouled one bit. paper acuracy is still good.

i scrub out bores as little as possible.

Evan

THat's almost impossible to do in my experience. I have treated a lot of bores this way, and everybody who's tried the same trick has gotten fine results.

I scrub out bores as little as possible myself. I shoot them until they tell me they need cleaning. Have shot some nearly 500 rounds between cleanings.

But that is aside from getting the bore in shape to shoot well in the first place.

MD

Mule Deer,

What kind of lapping compound do you use? And how do you know when the thing is good enough?

Appreciate your comments. Makes sense to me.

The Ruger #1V 22-250 i just picked up has almost the exact stock as that one...swear it was the same one.