Not long ago I picked up another Montana, this one BNIB in 7-08. When the package arrived from the dealer, I did the usual- give in to my OCD tendencies, and tear rifle apart to inspect it. Inside the mag well of the stock the date was written in sharpie. November of 2014. Good stuff, a new production rifle. Should have all the kinks worked out. Well it did. The action screws were properly clearanced, mag box had plenty of play in the assembled rifle, bedding looked pretty good, the barrel was nicely and evenly floated (more on this later), and the crown looked good. Of course I couldn't help myself, and before even shooting the rifle I had to skim bed the action, bed the Talley LW's (the screws were free of interference), coat the bore in DBC and put DGS on all remaining metal, adjust the trigger down to 1.5 lbs, and polish the crown. I got an FX3 6x42 with LRD and M1 ele out of the safe and mounted it up, and was all set for the initial shooting session.

Well the results over the next several sessions were not overly encouraging as I tried different powders, bullets, seating depths, different ways to hold the rifle, and I even tried switching up the colour of my socks. Nothing seemed to help. Some groups were okay, like 1.5" for 5 shots, and others continued to range from bad to dismal. Like this one.

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And this one.

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So I thought I'd try a couple more tweaks before ordering a new tube. I took the rifle home and checked the barrel float. The barrel was still floating nice and evenly on both sides...all the way to the barrel shank, where it was contacting the stock. I decided to float the barrel shank all the way back to the receiver. The next session went like this:

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[img]http://i1272.photobucket.com/albums...D-4CD3-A11B-15FE8DC34EF6_zpsnxxce7z9.png[/img]


At the end of the day, after all the items on the regular list checked out okay, floating the barrel shank back to the receiver seemed to do the trick. So if any of you are struggling to get the accuracy that you expect, don't forget to add barrel bedding/floating tweaks to your arsenal.

A few days after getting some loads selected, this showed up from chris84 here on the campfire:

[img]http://i1272.photobucket.com/albums...F-486F-AE17-4CB2EA1F9527_zpsqqshpjt5.jpg[/img]

I have a funny feeling this rig will see some time on the sheep mountains this fall...

[img]http://i1272.photobucket.com/albums...4-42E7-9255-372D46BD1323_zpsjqhdsqma.jpg[/img]