Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters JB, which has been your favorite rifle in 257 Bob and why?

I've got a Ruger Hawkeye, in a walnut stock i really like.

Yeah, she really likes it--but when she ordered it from Melvin Forbes 18 years ago, she wanted a 22" Douglas #1 contour barrel, because she wanted it as light as possible. At the time NULA had an "office manager" who wasn't too efficient, and didn't put in the right order. As a result, it got a 24" #2 contour.

It's still pretty light, but not as light as the NULA .270 she already had. However, a few years later Eileen started developing recoil headaches, and had to start using long guns with less recoil. We eventually determined the heaviest possible recoil she could take was around 15 foot-pounds, and it turned out the heavier barrel just about results in about 14.5 foot-pounds with the handload she started using a few years later, the 100-grain Barnes TTSX at 3150 fps. She likes the rifle even more now!

Have had various stocks on my 722, including a custom stock made by a friend which had the wrong LOP and was very heabv, the walnut Mountain Rifle stock, a laminated from somewhere (can't remember now), the original factory stock--and another factory stock, because the original got severely damaged during a move in 1990.

Have not been able to tell any difference in accuracy between any of them, as long as they were bedded the same way--epoxy-bedded front end of the action, all behind the recoil lug, with no "support" bedding of the rear end of the barrel. Also, have never pillar-bedded any of them, which in my experience (and that of several "accuracy" rifle smiths) isn't all that helpful as long as the stock itself is made of heavy enough material in the action-screw areas.

The accuracy when I first started handloading for the rifle was around 1/2" for 5-shot shot groups with "varmint" style bullets from the 75-grain Sierra hollow-point to the 85-grain Nosler Ballistic Tip. With 100-120 grain big game bullets 5-shot groups went into an inch, or less. This included the 100-grain Partition loaded to around 3250 fps with IMR4350--the load I used when guiding pronghorn hunters in the late 1980s. Despite what would be considered a really suck ballistic coefficient these days, it worked fine for my own hunting out to 450 yards, and when finishing off client's wounded animals out to 550. This was long before laser rangefinders, when I used the reticle in my scope to estimate range.

Part of the reason 721/722s shot so well was the quality of the button-rifled barrels, pioneered and patented by Mike Walker during WWII. In fact, one of the articles on my schedule is on the 1903A3 Springfield--apparently the first rifle to feature button-rifled barrels.

"What did you think.of the Kimber?"

Beautiful walnut-stocked rifle, especially for the price. Stock bedding was good, but there was a problem with misfires, due firing-pin mainspring adjustment. Tried to adjust it per instructions, but screw was frozen.

Accuracy did not approach the 722's--but then only the NULA's has matched the 722.