I'm curious if any of you have noticed savage quality going down? I've never been a savage guy personally, but always heard they were very accurate. So I've been developing loads for my grandsons new 308 shooting 165/168 gr bullets with variety, 4895, 4064 and I cannot get this rifle to shoot. I have adjusted the bedding and the trigger, along with seating depth, etc....and I'm only getting 1.5" groups at best. Did he just get a Lemmon?
It may not be a lemon per se, but it is bordering on non typical Savage behavior. I have shot 2 different savage rifles that were almost as bad as your grandson's rifle. One was a 270 win and the other a 30-06. With the 270, it had a bad crown, my buddy sent it back to savage and they replaced the barrel. Excellent CS in that case. The 30-06 was a pain in the azz. One of my co-workers bought a trophy hunter package rifle and he said the best he could do was 3" with the rifle at 100 yards. I told him I could get it to shooting better for him, so I took it home and proceeded to work on it. The first thing I did was pull the cheap azzed bases and rings off and threw them away (literally). I threw on a good set of bases and rings and loctited everything down. I checked to make sure his barrel was freefloated well enough and relieved a couple spots in the stock. I also adjusted the trigger down to and even 2.5 pounds. I then started a little load development and took it to the range. Just about every load shot into moa and printed nice triangular groups. Honestly, I was not used to that big of a group from a Savage bolt action rifle. I just assumed since it was a 30-06, maybe that was some of the reason. However I have some Winchester model 70 30-06 rifles that shoot 1/2 moa (for 3 shots) at 100 yards easily. I brought the Savage 30-06 back in to the guy at work with 6 targets I had shot that were all centered on the bulls eye (orange dot) and right at an inch even. He looked at it and said, "Hmmm, I was expecting better". Obviously some guys watch too many youtube videos or something and have an unrealistic expectation of what a $300.00 package rifle can do accuracy wise. Funny thing is, he took the rifle home and fired off some factory ammo and brought back his targets that were 2" now, instead of 3". I told him, "he needed to work on his shooting skills....Because that is a true moa for 3 shots rifle"....
