Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Gunsmithing Bed this or not ?

I have a Remington 700 Long Range and recently took the stock off (Bell and Carlson M40 )to do some trigger work(safe 2 pound pull now).
I have not had the chance to shoot it yet as I just got it back from Remington,so only firing of the rifle has been done at factory.
I noticed some things though that Makes me wonder if I should bed this stock or not(I have never bedded a rifle)
on the aluminum block there are marks on the front and tang area.
The Recoil lug appears to only be making contact at the top close to the barrel(see shiny spot at top of recoil lug recess in pic)
Should I bed this rifle for best accuracy?or will the action and lug mate themselves with repeated firing?
If the rifle needs to be bedded for best accuracy would I need to Bed just the lug area/OR?
I really dont want to remove any of the bedding block to bed the rifle.

Thanks

If it was mine, I would shoot it first.

Yup. No point in fretting about a problem that may not even exist.

I would automatically bed any and every rifle. Making sure the bedding is consistent on an unstressed action is always worth doing.

Bed just the Lug? bed in front and rear of the lug?just the rear of lug?Bed the tang?

Given the pics which bedding method would be suggested ?
Remember that i have never bedded a rifle so I need specifics !! LOL

Thanks

I would bed down the sides of the action, the tang, and the lug.

The barrel is obviously pretty heavy so I would not likely bed the whole barrel. I wold skim bed the blocks with a very thin coat of epoxy and probably grind a bit off the tops just to keep the skim coat a little tougher (thicker).

My preferences is to bed the lug in tight with just a couple layers of tape on the bottom of the lug only. I want it to fit tight and reference everything the same every time.

Neutral bedding means the action is not screwed in tight but rather held in by light pressure to ensure good squeeze-out of the epoxy so it fills all the gaps without putting any stress on the action.

I usually put the action screws in almost snug and then back out a full turn to keep the holes clear.

Thanks Sitka deer
Thanks to barm and gnoahhh for the comments as well.

What are you torqueing your screws down too. To be shining stuff up like that it looks like it's moving around a bunch. I would torque it up to 55-60 inch pounds and see how it shoots.

If you bed it properly it shouldn't hurt the accuracy. But I would never bed a rifle that hasn't been shot. If it's accurate, I have better things to do with my time than fix things that aren't broken. (I have a lot of actually broken chit around the house that needs attention).

For me, if a sporting weight barreled rifle shoots MOA or better, I'm good. I don't give a rat's-azz about benchrest accuracy on a light weight barrel rifle; I'll never "need" the additional accuracy. But there are a lot of people who do 99% of their shooting at the bench and want to be able to brag to their friends. Me, I can't stand shooting from a bench and only do it when I have to.

I dont know what the factory torqued it at before they shot it.
Like I said I haven,t shot it yet,called Bell and Carlson and they recomended 50 inch pounds on both screws.

Thanks for your input

Yes I am sure I will shoot it first,just looking for input on the bedding.
This is a heavy barrel,Heavy rifle for long range hunting so I sure hope it does better than an inch at a hundred.
I will only be benching the rifle to test accuracy.
I want to be prepared for a 5 or 6 hundred yard shot and while an inch might suffice I want the most accuracy I can get.

Thanks for your comments

Torque wrench? Really??? I favor KISS.

OK - I can see it if one is a competition shooter. Or really, really anal! Or shooting a Weatherby without properly bedding the thing yourself. Many other factory stocks of all brands are not bedded exactly flat in the stock also- but in my experience, more Wbys are real touchy about exactly torqued screws than other brands. If the inlet fitting (bedded or not) is correct, one should not need the exacting touch of just so torqued screws. IMO.

How many of you actually torque-wrench your hunting rifles?

I bed like SD does- only I was taught in gun-smithing school to give the front of the recoil lug a layer or two of electrical tape for relief- easier in/out.

If everything is bedded in correctly, the receiver screws will go from coming snug to tight as they can go with screwdriver pressure in 1/2 turn. 1/4 turn is even better. I do index the screws to the same spot each time on the bottom metal. Probably not quite as accurate as to-the-pound torque wrench, but seems to work.

YMMV - but I tighten first the front, then the back receiver screws. If there is a middle one, that one goes just snug, not tight. I've seen instructions that vary from this, but prefer my way.

My system works fine for me, and I don't need no stinkin torque wrench. Those things are for lug-nuts, etc.... If I need to take the action out of the stock away from the shop, all I need is the Chapman set, or a single screwdriver, with the preferably proper bit and I am assured things will come back to, or very close to the original POI when fired.

You do want to target fire it if possible if you can before using it on an animal. Just to be sure. But to date, I've never found the POI to be more than an inch or so off from original. Still, I try not to disassemble anything in the field if I can help it, but like to keep that base covered. Without packing a torque wrench around with me.

As bcraig et al say, shoot the rifle first. You aren't Columbus, but you need to know where you start from to have an idea of where you want to get to.

For me all action screws and scope mounting systems all get the torque wrench every time. The smaller the screw the more important it is. In a jam I could do it without but I would rather not. A guy with a trained hand can get close but why guess. It keeps things consistent. In the field if I don't have my torque wrench I have no problem doing it by hand but this is what I do for a living. I have found it makes a difference on almost all bolt action rifles. The difference is the better they are bedded the less important.

torque wrench? blah.
Tight is tight and too tight is broken off, that's all you need to know.

Yup, as long as the mating sides of "tight" fit perfectly...

bedding is the least likely thing to affect accuracy, but when it does, it typically does so in a noticeable amount. I would use a torque wrench on a non bedded inlet to attempt to duplicate the situation and document the conditions. on a properly bedded rifle, the widow of torque can be opened up quite a bit without worry. ....IMO.

Clamp your stock in a vice , put a dial indicator at the muzzle, and start tightening and loosening screws. You might be amazed at how flexible an action can be. A torque wrench has its place and will give you more consistency every time you take down your rifle for maintenance. I don't use electric tape on scope rings and I don't pick my teeth with a bowie knife, but I am a damned good gunsmith and "close" is just not good enough. As an additional thought, check your bore for copper fouling and remove what you find before going back to the range. Good bedding, free floated barrel, proper torque, a good trigger, and a clean barrel should shoot better than the average guy is capable of.

"bedding is the least likely thing to affect accuracy".

On my planet it is the most likely.

Not the first thing I check, mind you, but usually the most likely culprit. Perhaps that's what you meant?

Thorough cleaning, visual check of bore, crown, tightness check of scope screws and receiver screws*, swap out the scope for a known quality, testing with different loads. (my 260 goes 4-5 MOA with any 120 or 160 factory load tested so far, but shoots 140 gr. factory Corelokts right at MOA - sometimes less - I'd prefer using 120's but I can live with the 140's). And yes, it is bedded and free-floated.

*The receiver screw check will tell you if the receiver is properly (flat!) bedded or not - I've gone over this many times before... as Stick says: "hint". If tightening the receiver screws torques the receiver, the rifle gets bedded right there (if it's going to be mine, and recommended if someone else's). Period. In fact, I don't own a bolt rifle that isn't glass-bedded - and all showed accuracy improvement from before to after.

I've even bedded a two piece Savage 99 stock for a customer with outstanding results. Cleaning the bore reduced group size from about 2 feet diameter and 5 feet high and right to 10-12 inches, 18 inches right and 5 inches high. Fixed horizontal by max-drifting rear and front sights appropriately even if it did look odd.. they sure didn't line up with the barrel axis! After bedding appropriate stock and fore-end surfaces, the first 3 rounds clover-leafed, with open sights, 2 inches high, centered. The next three opened up that group to just over an inch, and I quit while I was ahead. Heck, my eyes aren't even that good.

The customer never came back on me, so I figured he was doing all right with it after that, having missed a whole moose at 35 yards the year before.

When I removed that ugly muzzle bulge on a used Ru77 '06 purchase, I wound up with a 17 inch bbl hence the rifle being named "Stub". With factory bedding, including fore-end pressure point, the first 3 rounds would cloverleaf, 5 round groups opened to 5 inches or so. Randomly. I thought about it for some months, then just before hunting season glass bedded the receiver and a couple inches of barrel, free-floating the rest. It then (and now- 20 some years later) shoots most anything into 1.25 MOA or less for as many rounds as I care to put through it. Maybe I traded "accuracy" for consistency and worry-free hunting in bad weather, but I don't look at it that way. The first thing I killed with it was a ram at @330 yards. I've killed out to 356 long paces with it and am perfectly comfortable doing so given the range and a rest.

Of the dozens of rifles I've bedded, for myself and others, all but a handful showed at least some improvement in group size, usually significantly. New barrels fixed the bad ones after all other options were exhausted. $10 worth of epoxy is cheaper than a new barrel and is often sufficient. If still hinky, then comes a hail-Mary re-crowning and if possible a barrel setback before springing new-barrel money.

Which is how I wound up with a heavy 27 inch '06 barrel on the original .270 Jefferson Custom .270. Couldn't find a thing wrong with it after it went from MOA to 7MOA after my brother stored it in a wet basement for a year or two. The only reason I got it back after a 21-year loan, I suspect..... I actually re-bedded it twice before giving up - then full-length bedded the remodel from the get-go. Works too. 10 rounds for initial sight in/group check, 11th round bang-flopped a caribou at RF 379 yards.

Proper bedding is where accuracy starts, just as a foundation is the most important part of a building.

You (las) nailed it with the first and last sentence of your response. . The other guy, not so much... Threads like these are absolutely ridiculous. Bed the damn thing...Nuff said..

shoot it first, get a baseline. the B&C bedding block is pretty good at it's job. if shooting shows problems, then address them.