Bought a Tanger in 7 mag back in 93 when working at LGS. It was straight out Jekyll and Hyde.
That prompts me to tell this story about my M77 .338 Win mag. I purchased the rifle used, at a time when we were talking about some day hunting Sitka blacktails in Alaska, but without any definite plan. The rifle was in pristine condition, but could not be made to shoot a group less than about 8 inches, regardless of who shot it. Life moved on, and since I was at the time living in Houston, both elk hunting and Alaska were far away. A move to Colorado changed the opportunities, and although by then I was using my very accurate Ruger M77 in 7mm Rem. mag on elk to good effect, the .338 remained a big question mark.
At the conclusion of a successful Colorado elk hunt, the four of us were having dinner and drinks before Finn would return to Texas and the rest of us would return to work. The post-hunt discussion turned into a gun swap, with Finn taking possession of my .338 to experiment with it to see what was the problem. At home he set it into his long, open gunrack next to his computer desk. As was his habit, the .338 alongside all his family rifles, sat in the rack with a .338 bullet set point-first into the muzzle of the barrel. He always put a bullet of the caliber of each rifle into its muzzle to keep mud dauber wasps from filling the barrels with mud nests. The loose bullet would simply fall out if the rifle was grabbed in sudden need.
One day Finn was idly fiddling with that .338 bullet, lifting it and plunking it into the muzzle, but then once flipped the bullet base down and to his amazement, the base of the bullet dropped neatly into the barrel! Upon inspection he discovered that the rifling stopped well short of the muzzle! In his typical pragmatic African bush way, Finn hacksawed off 2 inches of barrel, re-crowned it using a bolt in a drill, and voila, the rifle shot around a 2 inch group when tested. Mystery solved.
I ultimately ended up with the rifle back, and later had Rich Reiley of High Tech Customs re-barrel the rifle with a Lilja barrel and true the action. This turned the old tang safety Ruger, still in .338 Win mag, into a 1-inch rifle with 250 gr. Swift A frames (when I do my part). It did eventually take a Sitka blacktail, and many elk.
