Well the retirement is a bit of a story. About 5 years back developed some health issues that firing a horse pill from a miniature mortar shell was not helping. About that time I had an 03 from the 20's and traded into straight across a New Haven 70 classic in 06, that I am still working on getting the full potential out of, ok its more me than the rifle.
For the past year I have been on a bit of a forced retirement and started to get back into shooting after not doing much at all for years.
Now for the 338 - its a mid 70's Win Push feed, classic stock that has been in at least one horse wreck and the butt looks like someone stirred a campfire with it at one time. Yeah, it definitely has character. It weighs about 8 lbs all up and kicks like a mule with 250's, which it seems to love and when I was in practice with it could do MOA at any time using RL19.
So back in April I took it out and it wouldn't even stay in minute of berm, and thinking it was me, shot up quite a few rounds. Got home with it and thinking of selling but actually the thing isn't worth the time to post it up, so went to work on it.
The barrel was a geologists dream, it was a dark coal mine in there and after getting the carbon out found a rich vein of copper embedded. Montana extreme treatment over four days finially played that out and then JD bore paste to manually lap the barrel which seems to have helped.
Bedded the action and two inches of barrel, refinished the stock to a nice muted oil finish, found the scope to have a bad spot in the variable so switched to a new Nikon (my current favorite of scopes)made sure everything was snug, tight, glued or whatever would work short of welding it together and went back to the range.
So now I am at a 1.5 grouping rifle, a reflection of me not the gun, and with some quality time should again be back at MOA. It may just become my main go to again.
This little "retirement" has been an education with all the guns I have fixed for myself since January and there isn't an empty piece of brass in the house.
As you can tell from the length of this post, now I need a job to again support this affliction, and the damn barry obamarama show isn't helping.
