Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunting Rifles Pillar bed Boyd's gun stock?

Is it necessary to pillar bed one of these? My wife picked one up for me to finish and put on my savage 110 300 wm. I want to tweak this rifle as much as I can to get the accuracy out of it and if necessary will start by adding pillars. Any experts on here have an opinion?

MM

PM sent... I have 5 boyd's stocked rifles... Sometimes they need a little tweaking.

In my two CZ rifles one was excellent without having to do anything. The other the barrel was touching and had to remove a bit of stock. After that they both shot great. In my Tikka rifles there was some problems. Boyd's does not cut the trigger guard hole correctly. The trigger guard hole is a bit to deep at the ends and when the trigger guard is tightened all the way down the magazine binds because the shape of the trigger guard gets distorted. . I fixed that by putting in a washer below the trigger guard and no more binding and mag problems. At some point I will just glass in the trigger guard.


Regards,
Dan

I have had 3 or 4 Boyd stocks. Have never felt a need to pillar bed. No issue snugging up the action screws without 'crushing' the wood. As noted above, sometimes they require some tweaking in the form of opening up bolt cuts, or barrel channels. But have always been accurate.

That..

Still - a good glass bed should be done..

Laminated wood still shrinks and swells and still can split. If I am glass bedding any wood stock I will always cast fibreglass pillars to improve strength and stability. Since it unlikely that mass production stocks will be precisely fitted to the action, I would always plan on glass bedding. GD

I also make a cross bolt just behind the recoil lug, bedded in acraglas gel with stainless steel powder, as is the recoil area.

My simple test is to torque the front screw with the rear loose. It should go from loose to tight in about 1/4 turn. Now tighten the rear screw and it should go from loose to tight in about 1/4 turn.
Now reverse the procedure and torque the rear first, then the front. If the screws don't go from loose to torque tight in 1/4 turn in any of those sequences you are crushing wood or bending the action and you need to bed.

It's as simple as this: Always glass bed, you don't always have to pillar bed. Hint...

Considerations and options:

I would shoot it first as long as you have a "free fit" with the barrel - the front, side, and bottom edges of the recoil lug - and last make sure there's no or at least, very little contact of the receiver's side walls to the stock.

Tighten your guard screws finger tight, and then using a torque wrench, continue tightenin in alternating increments - 10 in-lbs at a time but not more than 40 in-lbs front, 30 rear - and you should be safe from compressing the laminated wood.

The laminated wood that Boyds and other reputable stock producers use is impregnated with phenolic or epoxy resins under tremendous pressures. The laminations or layers run counter-grain to each other so they are incredibly stable to longitudinal and lateral stress (they don't flex) and given that almost all of the wood cells within the stock are otherwise stabilized, there's very little chance that humidity and moisture will have an effect on your rifle IF you ensure that all wood surfaces have been sealed. (Unless you do additional inletting of a finished stock, it should be adequately sealed.) In other words, there is very little physical capability of the wood cell structures to absorb (additional) moisture.

Having said that, should you have to do major inletting to fit your action, why not go ahead and pillar-bed it. If the pillars raise the receiver just 10 thousandths above the non-bedded position, you've only go two contact points to be concerned with as the rest of the action is totally free-floated. If you do pillar-bed, you can increase your torque settings to up to 65 inch-lbs front, 45 rear without compressing aluminum pillars.

Hope this helps or least gives you alternatives to consider.

Best wishes for the new year,
P-Man

The concept that almost all of the wood cells are stabilised is something that may occur in the brochure or on the website but not in the real world. In reality, the veneer is porous and often of poor quality. This is why the stocks split between the glue joints.
The laminated stocks we get today bear no relationship whatsoever to the fine walnut/maple laminates we used to get from Fajen. GD

I respect that. Although I've been involved with stock work since the sixties - including the 'glory' days of Reinhart Fajen and Bishop - my total experience with laminate stocks has been with Boyds, who uses Rutland STRATABOND laminate. As I understand it, they stack 1/16" plies of birch in alternating grain direction. The stacks are soaked in a proprietary resin formula then put in an oven that has an internal press. The resultant 'sandwich' is then subjected to tremendous heat and pressure, both to force resin into every possible void and to ensure the proper cure of the resin. Althouh forcing the resin into the cell structure of the wood makes laminate heavier (about 5 oz. more) than a comparable traditional wood stock, it is far stronger than hollow fiberglass shell stocks; in fact the only stock materials stronger are the modern-day kevlar/carbon fiber composites. Having said that, there is no substitute for properly fitting a receiver into ANY kind of stock - if the preponderance of recoil energy is directed IMPROPERLY against only one point such as the rear tang area, you will have problems including increasing damage to that part of the stock no matter what the composition happens to be.

You have many high-end, after-market, composite stocks produced today that do not have pillar beds, much less an aluminum chassis. Most shooters paying $400+ are never going pillar bed that stock. If the consumer demanded it, competition in the market place would force those same stock makers to employ pillar bedding or the alouminum chassis. The point I'm making is that you don't need to pillar bed just because it's made of laminate any more than you would need to with any full-synthetic composition stocks. Again, with regards to other points of view, respectfully that's my opinion.

Rutland Plywood burned to the ground in 2014. Have they rebuilt?

I think so - I know that Boyds had some wood in storage that carried them throught for a while. I ordered three stocks last year that were up to quality with no issues.