Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters Tacticool bolt knobs why are they so big?

R R

Do I have your permission to STEAL that post ?

I could use it appropriately in a number of places !!

Jerry

With my blessings, Jerry.

I am a lefty, who hunted with RH bolt guns for over a decade. If I carried it on my left shoulder (and hunting the intermountain west involved a lot of climbing mountains), the bolt would dig into my hip, or even get hooked onto my belt, or a back pocket. The last thing I would have wanted was a bigger bolt that stuck out even farther. If I carry a LH bolt gun into thick stuff on my shoulder, I have some issue now with the bolt catching on brush and branches. Again, the last thing I would want is something that sticks out further.

The point I am making is that the oversize bolt knobs have both benefits and drawbacks that involve the overall functionality of the rifle. There are real drawbacks to oversize bolt knobs that amount to more than just aesthetic preferences.

Obviously that rifle was built for beauty. To paraphrase one of the old stock masters, would you wear rubber boots with a tuxedo?

Excellent point. Lefties shooting RH bolt guns should absolutely consider not utilizing an oversized knob/handle. But then the discussion of lefties shooting righty is hardly one about optimizing or Tayloring equipment to an end user or task. I guess as long as your making due, you... make due


How about it? Every mile you carrried that dang thing I bet you were thinking- if this things bolt handle wee any bigger I’d just hang it all up and find a new hobby.

Do you usually head into the thick stuff with your rifle on your shoulder? At any rate- you’d really want a bolt that locks in that scenario- or if your that worried- maybe a lever gun. No branches will open that action up inadvertently- which I know from extensive 24hour campfire research is a problem only surpassed by bolt handles snapping off. Both of which are issues compounded by a larger handle.

Or as George Gobel once quppied, “a brown pair of shoes?” 😀

I just swore a lot and pondered how stupid some people are. I use the same method to deal with BS today. How many times do you take your gun off your shoulder in a day's hiking, that encompasses 40 degree slopes, thick timber, and a couple thousand vertical feet, and open grassland? If I had to take the rifle off, I did. If I didn't have to, I didn't, just like now. If I am carrying the rifle on my shoulder, it's because I have a good reason to. If I have to carry it in my hands all GD day because of a bolt either jabbing me or catching on random crap, then it's a design problem. Like I said, I can't see the point of an all-around hunting rifle having a more distinct bolt. I can see the benefit of having an easily graspable bolt if you are on your belly behind a rifle for long periods of time.

I have a fairly extensive collection of hunting books and magazines, some of them going back to the 19th century. This entire thread is starting to remind me of the arguments that once raged over whether sidelock side-by-side shotguns should have outside hammers, the ugliness of bolt-action rifles compared to levers (or vice versa), the extreme disadvantages of telescopic sights for deer hunting, or the vicious gang-fights that took place 30-some years ago over synthetic stocks, when one riflemaker called a certain gun writer a "traitor." Even the so-called "classic" rifle in the photo Jorge posted resulted in a bunch of semi-violent reactions.

Of course, a lot of the comments include "I've been using ..... and never needed....." I have noticed over the years that the world would be a very strange place if everybody agreed on very best town to live in, the ideal spouse, or the perfect rifle. If they did, there'd be one very crowded town with a bunch of people married to one person, and a very boring selection of rifles in the local sporting goods store.

No doubt, and I have no vested interest in how another guy shucks his empties. It’s meaningless to me. I had always figured that the way I shucked mine didn’t matter to them- come to find out that in fact my methodology and equipment is not only considered by others, but considered by others to be a sign of genital deficiency, and an overly rich fantasy life. Why the hell they would put that much thought into something they aren’t interested in is curious. Equally curious and assinine are the presentation of rifles directly descended from an action of military origin as the staunch guard against something “tacticool”. Please.


Now I know my experience is of little consequence on the internet- so I refrain from listing it- conversely if you aren’t John B/ mule deer, or a guy I know personally, I certainly wont be the lending any creedence to your experience in a conversation in which a prerequisite is the abandonment of mine. If the assumption is made that I outfit my rifles in a flight of fancy,
I can only attribute that perspective to reflect a lack of real world experience on the part of the guy who holds it. And you can’t argue with that lack of perspective and experience- only tease it a little bit.

But pointless threads are fun in that you can spout off and never really be wrong. Kinda therapeutic.

So long as it's kept civil.

Good luck with that. Incidentally, just did a quick mental inventory on how many rifles I have with either metal, metal skeletonized, aluminum and plastic buttplates. I'm such a rube I guess....

Nobody is demanding you abandon your own perspective.

So tell me, what year did you begin shooting your own rifles? Would it be as far back as 1962? You really ought not disparage the experience level of someone you know nothing about. Disagree on taste and preferences all day long, but do try and keep it real.

I have never known being old to make someone right or wrong in and of itself.

"A good rifle with a fine custom stock having a recoil pad looks like a man in evening clothes wearing rubber boots." I first read that quote from Thomas Shelhamer in Roy Dunlap's book GUNSMITHING back when I was starting to make wooden stocks, as I did for several years in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

Dunlap prefaced it with his own comments: "Recoil pads should never be used except for rifles of very heavy recoil, or for injured persons or others not able to take normal recoil.... Recoil pads detract so much from the appearance of a good stock that they should never be used unless absolutely necessary. Their effect on accuracy is totally unimportant in the hunting arm, however, so they do not detract from the performance of the rifle." Apparently he was as recoil-proof as Elmer Keith, and as unable to comprehend why some other person might not be. Which is of course the case with most humans, who think since they're not recoil-sensitive, or like liver and onions, that everybody else is exactly the same. This seems odd when Dunlap (and Shelhamer) were both custom gunsmiths, supposedly making rifles the way their customers wanted, but there it is.

Of course, when GUNSMITHING was first published in 1950, there were only two kinds of recoil pads, solid models made of pretty hard rubber, which didn't get softer with age, and "ventilated" pads that many shooters didn't like for their looks, or as Ken Waters sometimes pointed out, the fact that their holes could fill with mud in the field. Steel was probably better--except for people who did hurt when a metal buttplate shoved their shoulder. I remember very well the first time my wife fired the .257 Roberts Remington 722 I inherited from my grandmother. I assured Eileen it did not kick hard, but when she fired it she yelped, and called me something not very complimentary.

The fact is that we do NOT all have the same natural padding on our shoulder, though Eileen was otherwise not particularly sensitive to recoil itself until a few years ago, when she started getting recoil headaches. She not only hunted frequently with a NULA .30-06 weighing under 6-1/2 pounds with scope, but test-fired a .416 Remington Magnum made by the late gunsmith Dave Gentry, who wanted to know what she thought. But unlike the .257 Roberts, both of those rifles had modern, soft recoil pads.

I have also seen a few rifles with aluminum or steel buttplates dropped, with the heel hitting some relatively hard surface and the wood behind the metal cracking, usually with a chunk chipping completely off. Of course, some hunters never drop a rifle, or fall.

However, I freely admit there some personal animosity toward metal buttplates. My first centerfire big game rifle was a Savage 99 .308 Winchester with an aluminum buttplate, back when I was a lean 13-year-old. I was a good shot when I got it, but not after it whacked my skinny shoulder over the next several years, due to a flinch. I still don't understand why anybody with any other option possible would deliberately put a metal plate on the only part of a big game rifle that shoves us.

True. Even being experienced sometimes means you know a lot more about what NOT to do than what you should do. Nonetheless, to conclude that someone else must not be experienced because they disagree with you is faulty reasoning at best, and is probably just an attempt to return the favor of getting under another's skin.

You’ve got to understand here- niether m experience nor yours is relevant. Your position is that regular is functional enough, and oversized is ugly. Because you’ve based half of your arguments against the oversized bolt knob on the adequate rather than the ideal I couldn’t debate them even if I were so inclined, the remainder of your argument is aesthetic and assumes that my decision must be based on aesthetics as well, adequacy having been established. Why bother? Enjoy what you’ve got going- it’s adequate.

Meanwhile I’ve got a guy arguing against oversized bolt knob based on his experience as a lefty carrying a right handed rifle. What the hell could i possibly say to argue against that? S h I t- it’s probably good advice. If lefty shooting righty- go for the butterknife maybe- you got bigger problems.

And finally- the elder statesman posting rifles of military derivation right down To grooves for stripper clips machined into the receiver arguing against the “tacticool”


That’s how The assertion that more mechanical advantage is favorable is met around here- nothing about that makes me feel like I need to state my expertise. I’d feel silly trying to establish myself as a subject matter expert in this particular discussion. I’m talking fuel air ratio, and compression ratio and your talking about tuck and roll chrome and piping. Im out of my depth you might say

MD, thanks, couldn't remember where I saw that.
You gotta admit, no you don't as its a matter of taste, that a beautiful piece of wood looks better without being whacked off and having a chunk of black grafted on. I see Shelhamer's comment as aimed purely at the aesthetic Dunlap's rhetoric not withstanding. Functionality is an altogether different matter. Most of my rifles/shotguns wear rubber boots because I shoot better with them and have straight grain wood which Shelhamer probably wouldn't touch except to throw on the fire.

What you consider "the ideal" differs from mine. Conventional size IS ideal in my perspective for a number of reasons. You are most welcome to your own perspective, and I'll keep mine. This is very much like two sightless men arguing the characteristics of an elephant based on what they feel at opposite ends of the animal. You might even think the tactical look is a thing of beauty---you're entitled to think that if you like. I'll simply agree to disagree with you and leave it at that.

I think you just described most of West Virginia.....

It all comes down to what you like. As an Accounting professor was fond of saying, there is no accounting or taste. Which makes this thread pointless though I find it interesting to read other people's perspectives.