I have not heard of any which were soft but did hear, from one of the Parker Hale guys, of some which were too hard. They tried to bump up the hardness a little to make the actions a little slicker and had some issues with stress cracking. It was a short lived experiment and all those receivers were junked. The Santa Barbera were an alloy steel action. I would not use one for a 338 Lapua because I don't like the idea of opening up the mauser action for long cartridges. GD