How do you check to find out if an action truly needs "blueprinting"?
It depends on what you want from your rifle. If you’re not loading your own ammunition and tuning it to your rifle you have a ways to go before you need to true an action. Every action is built within tolerances. Production actions have large tolerances and a custom target action will have smaller tolerances. Remington actions are well known for large tolerances. Every action body is banana shaped and the bolt is too. Blueprinting is just going through the action and oversize cutting all the surfaces to align everything to the approximate centerline of the action.
Bottom line is that if the rifle meets your accuracy expectations and functions well you don’t need the action trued. If it doesn’t your best first step is to learn to load ammo and see how well you can tune a load to get it to meet expectations. Bed the rifle. When you get to the point of replacing the barrel you need to true the action at the same time.
