Thanks for all the great feedback so far. I’m leaning towards leaving the 700 the way it is. If I ended up putting a new stock, trigger, barrel costing etc I would be stripping the originality. It’s not worth much on the market and is the lowest tier Remington 700 ADL. Assuming my groups are closer to the 1.5 inch mark, this doesn’t seem that far off from typical accuracy out of this rifle without any modifications from my understanding. I don’t think Remington would have declared bankruptcy if all of their rifles were still shooting 1 MOA accuracy out of the box with only reducing the trigger pull down to 2.5 lbs. It sounds like the action is outstanding, but a lot people scrap the rest of the rifle. The tikka on the other hand shoot be able to get to 1 MOA any day based on what I’ve read. I will say that I was originally given 250 grain nosler partition hand loads for it that I could shoot 1 MOA, but have always been closer to 1.5 with any factory loads. It’s possible the rifle just prefers heavy bullets, but as I mentioned before, I’ve strayed away from the 250 grain loads as the recoil is significantly worse compared to the 210 grain Barnes TTSX and Nosler Partitions I’ve used on 6 bull elk.
I shot a friend’s Cooper in 270 that I can reliably shoot sub MOA which leads me to believe it’s more of a rifle/ammo issue more than poor shooting technique, but I’ll be the first to admit I need to put more time in at the range. I’m also looking at Kimber primarily for weight reasons, but this would obviously lead to increased recoil, so I would consider going to a 308 or smaller caliber. I weight 160 and am becoming less fond of recoil as I get older, but also want to balance that with using enough gun to the job done on elk within 400 yards. Thanks again all!
