You'd expect from me to come on and bitch about ruger again.
I won't. They are a good solid rifle for what they are. I've worked on a number of them and they shoot amazing well until needing bedding, and then all you do is bed the gun. I hate bedding 77s with that angled bedding screw but thats life.
All that being said Ruger themselves tried to make great guns out of the 77s, built 12 maybe, palma rifles to give to the palma team even extended the action length a bit to beef it up. IIRC after doing all the work and putting custom barrels on them, in the end, 2 were more or less good enough for palma.
You could build probably 12 palma guns off 700 actions and I'd suspect that 2 out of them would be bad enough not to be accepted... complete flilp flop.
In fairness I have no clue if their smith folks were even capable of making the palma run shoot or not.
Of course there is the BIll Ruger thing with me so I'll never find out personally.
