My Dad bought a 220 Swift 1953-vintage Model 70. It's darn near cherry, or it was after I laid the action in the solvent tank and got all the kloodge and 60 year old mung scrubbed off. Bottom metal is beautiful, and the barrel still has its throat, just shiny and pretty as can be. Obviously, while there's no box and hang tag, this was a safe queen. And even though Dad paid full collector price, he wants a rifle, not a relic.
But the rifle has issues. The bedding needs work. All the screws drag, there's plenty of springing, AND one of the bolt lugs shows no contact.
Mounted glass to it, finally shot it yesterday, just to get it on paper, then shot three for a "baseline" group, a .910 under less-than ideal conditions. Now my plan is to shoot groups, using shims and taking out the barrel and mid screw between groups to see what happens. I expect, a LOT will happen.
I've already done the bedding/trigger voodoo on several "shooter" pre-64s, with excellent results compared to pre-voodoo. In each case, the owners didn't care about collector value, they wanted a rifle.
So what would you all do? No touchie? Give it the works? And have any of you isolated the sight lug screw and fully floated the barrel, or did full length bedded work better?
If the rifle is as nice as you say it is, id buy a "shooter" stock off of ebay and glass bed that one. Keep the original in original unmolested condition. As for your bedding question, yes i have freefloated a std wt barrel. I used to have good pictures on photobucket, but you all know about photobucket. Freefloating the std wt barrel usually gives excellent results, as does a good bedding job.
