I have only owned 2 bolt action Browning rifles besides a couple of BLR's. The first is a 7mm-08 micro medallion that I bought for my son when he was 9. He still uses it on occasion and he is 23. I bought it used and never did a thing to it. It shoots around 1 MOA with my handload of 45 grs of Varget and the 120 gr NBT. We have taken it out to 550 yards and shot steel plates with it. That 20" barrel and wood stock will turn heads at that range.
My other Browning bolt action is a Hells Canyon McMillan long range X Bolt in 6.5 Creedmoor. The only thing I did to it was put a Timney trigger in it. It will easily shoot 1/2 to 3/4 MOA. The first day I brought it to the range I shot steel at 550 yards with Hornady factory 143 gr ELDx's.
There does not seem to be much love on the fire for Browning rifles. Is it because barrels are hard to replace (so I am told)? Is the bolt/trigger/receiver of faulty design?
I would buy another one without hesitation, but what are YOUR experiences with them?
Have owned a number of Browning rifles over the years, including a couple of Belgian made bolts, one of which was a "special run" .280 Remington, made for a hardware store in Billings, Montana. Have also owned one Japanese-made BAR, one BLR and a Belgian T-Bolt .22 LR. All were more than accurate enough, though the BLR .30-06 was among the most accurate .30-06 hunting rifles I've ever owned, regardless of action. My NULA Model 24 .30-06 is the only other one I recall right now that would beat it, and then not by much.
But your question is primarily about the bolt-actions from the A-Bolt onward. Have owned three A-Bolts, though the first was actually Eileen's. It was made in 1986, the year the A-Bolt appeared, and was sent to me for a magazine review--a .270 Winchester with a non-shiny walnut stock. It was accurate from the get-go, and also surprisingly light, 7-1/2 pounds with scope.
At the time Eileen had only been hunting two years, using my grandmother's old Remington 722 .257 Roberts, and not only wanted something a little more powerful for elk, but something lighter. Having no prejudices about what rifles should look like, she liked the A-Bolt, among other things due to the detachable magazine, which snapped inside the hinged floorplate. She always had troubles loading a magazine from the top in cold weather, due to some arthritis in her fingers, and could load the magazine at home, then snap it into place once we left the pickup to hunt. The writer's discount was also nice (around wholesale) and we didn't have much money back then.
We also didn't have many rifles, so I worked up three handloads for it, one for varmints using the 90-grain Sierra hollow-point, one with 130-grain Hornady Interlocks for derr-sized game, and one with 150-grain Partitions for larger game. With the 90 sighted-in an inch high at 100 yards, the other two loads were an inch or so higher, so we didn't have to dink with the scope. Over the next several years she killed animals from rockchucks to a bull moose with the rifle, at one point making 10 one-shot kills on big game in a row, including the moose, her first elk and a pronghorn at around 450 yards.
The only problem we had with it was early on, while I was still working up handloads for the article. It started misfiring, but switching to Federal primers from CCIs solved that--for a little while. It had to go back to Browning for a new firing-pin spring, luckily before hunting season opened, and never gave us any problem after that, even when hunting in below-zero weather.
I had two A-Bolts, both with a BOSS, the brake version. Both were test rifles, and while accurate I was never impressed by the BOSS, both because it was among the loudest muzzle brakes I've encountered, and because after dialing-in a load, accuracy could change with temperature. Back then the Hodgdon Extremes hadn't quite appeared, and factory ammo in particular could be very temp-sensitive--and the BOSS was partly promoted as a solution for making factory ammo shoot accurately. Otherwise the rifles worked fine, very accurate with good triggers.
The first X-Bolt I've fooled with was a .308 the first year they were introduced. It was assigned to me on an "industry" hunt for pronghorns, and was VERY accurate with the Winchester ammo supplied. (It did not have a BOSS.) But I was full up with .308s so did not buy it. Also borrowed a .243 for a magazine article, which also shot VERY well.
The only verified story I've heard about an A-Bolt/X-Bolt field failure came from a gunsmith I've known for decades. Somebody had taken a stainless A-Bolt on an Alaskan hunt, and partway through the bolt rusted shut, apparently because the guy never unloaded the chamber, and never oiled the bolt (or anything else) during the hunt. In fact the rifle came back on the flight from Alaska with the round in the chamber. On the other hand, the grizzly guide I hunted with in 2009 had a stainless A-Bolt .338 Winchester Magnum, and had never had any problem with it, apparently because he did take care of it.
