Originally Posted by Commissioner
I have a Remington 700 with a Bell & Carlson Stock. I would like to take the stock off of the action when transporting it via airline. Would pillar bedding improve the "repeatability" when the stock and action are put back together? Also, would you recommend bedding the rear of the recoil lug?

Thanks for your time and effort addressing this issue.


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This tube is 0.375" O.D with 0.065" wall thickness. It has to be drilled out for a 1/4-28 Remington action screws with at least a 1/4" drill .
https://www.onlinemetals.com/mercha...howunits=inches&id=283&top_cat=0
The Remington 700 Round action has a diameter of 1.36".
If I side mill one end of the pillar with a 1.25" end mill, the misfit will be taken up with the preload of precompressed pillars.
That means the tightened screw will spread the ears of the pillar end....as seen in the pic. Getting precompressed pillars with epoxy all over them, to be pushed into the stock, and then get the screws in line with the bottom metal is an exercise left to those wearing gloves. I did some rifles this week were I let the epoxy get a little hard, pulled the screws, added the bottom metal and tightened the screws again. This assumes the half hard epoxy will keep the concave end pillars from rotating. The trick is having the precompressed pillars very close to where the bottom metal lines up, so the epoxy can be almost hard when the bottom metal is added.

There are many ways to design pillars, Chad Dixon of Longrifles would be one that gets more metal to metal contact area. His spread out at the top.

Sometimes I just want to drill a small pillar hole and not mill out sections of the stock for a custom wide top pillar.
To get force multiplier effects of a V block where the pillar touches the receiver, a tiny pillar will spread the force over a wider area with preload spreading.
The coefficient of friction sounds like it is linear, but it is not. The higher the pressure in a spot the lower the coefficient. That means a bigger footprints is better and those ears forces to spread are more likely to do their share in resisting receiver torque reaction from rifling twist and bullet acceleration.

This is for drilling the 3/8" + hole for the pillar. If one can afford to drill larger holes, the effectiveness of prestressed pillars gets easier, and can even be made from Aluminum alloy.

I learned how to calculate action screw max torque from an engineer at Caterpillar posting on Practical Machinist. But there are variables involved and most guys on gun forums just want a recipe. That means they want to be told how many inch pounds.

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