Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters free float or not?

I have bedded the shoulder or about an inch and a half of the barrel on 700's forever with [i think] good results. Always wondered if perhaps a person should try leaving the barrel completely free floated and compare. But never did it. Just got a Sako Finnfire 11 17 hmr which is completely free floated. Has anyone actually tested both ways to see which is best? Understand this would still likely be an individual rifle "thing".

Over the years I have tried both ways many times. And I have enough documented evidence to say unequivocally that bedding the barrel is best, unless the barrel likes to be floated. I don't mean that in a smart ass way, but it is completely dependent on the rifle. And dependent to some degree on the load its shooting. And the hardness or softness of the front rest its being fired from.
Charlie

For me if the stock is stiff enough I always bedded the first 1.5 inches under the chamber then floated the rest. Always had great results with this but as mentioned all rifles have personalities and will act accordingly

Forbe's rifles seemed to shoot very well and consistently and as you know were bedded full length of the barrel in a very ridged stock, kind of like an extension of the 1.5 inches. But this method increases the problems of extraneous pressures on the barrel like a tight sling or hard rest etc., I would think. With only 1.5 in. these problems would be minimal. I can see as CS suggests it may even vary from load to load and like jmp says "all rifles have personalities". An article in PS magazine by a very famous manufacturer of sniper rifles [can't remember his name] said they always bedded the first inch or so ahead of the recoil lug. Then there are the bench rester's who always totally free float. It's all interesting.

I always bed in 2 steps.

1st is to bed the action & lug withe the barrel floated, & then shoot it to see how it shoots.

If it's good, you're done.

If not, proceed to bed the barrel. For me that usually consists of bedding an inch or so of the barrel in front of the lug & neutral pressure point near the end of the stock.

Emphasis on neutral.

Fwiw, Sako's have always seemed to shoot well fully floated for me, at least the long action versions, have.

MM

The "neutral pressure point" near the end of the stock is new to me. I've read that 6-10 lb of pressure is normally used, the idea is to suppress vibration I guess but I have never had good luck with it on stock bedded 700's. Zero was inconsistent over time and the way the rifle was handled. I never just removed the pressure point itself, I always fully bedded and completely free floated the barrel excepting for the first i.5 in. or so.

Sakos do seem to shoot well and are guaranteed for one inch five shot groups at 100yd. Given the reputation 17 hmr ammunition has for flyers it will be interesting to see. I'm not holding my breath.

Here's an article I published in Rifle a couple years ago:

NEW METHODS OF BOLT-ACTION BEDDING:
How new actions and stocks have improved accuracy

Until relatively recently, many centerfire bolt actions followed the same pattern, originally devised for military actions back when all military rifles had wooden stocks. Most early actions used the same basic design, featuring an integral recoil lug under the front end, with a hole in the middle for the front action screw. This drew the lug firmly into the stock’s mortise, usually preventing the stock from splitting after repeated recoil, though sometimes a transverse steel bolt was placed somewhere behind the lug.

The 98 Mauser and 1903 Springfield actions are prime examples of this, along with several of other bolt actions designed in the late 19th and early 20th century, including some commercial rifles. The gun writers of the day often included a critique of the stock bedding on commercial rifles, mentioning their high regard for “close” inletting of both action and barrel.
In fact, many considered tight inletting necessary for fine accuracy, and while to a certain extent this applies to the action, some shooters realized rifles tended to shoot more accurately with the barrel “floated” enough to prevent touching the forend during firing. Perhaps the earliest reference I have run across is in the 1965 book Mister Rifleman, a collection of Col. Townsend Whelen’s articles.

In an article on the .22-250, Whelen mentions meeting gunsmith J.E. Gebby in the summer of 1938. Gebby had copyrighted the name “Varminter” for the cartridge, and they shot one of Gebby’s .22-250s—and Whelen had to have one. Gebby did the barrel/action work, but Whelen notes: “My old friend Bill Humphrey made a perfect stock for it, free floating the medium-weight 27-inch barrel. This proved to be decidedly the best varmint rifle I have ever owned. The next year I took it to the benchrest matches at Johnstown, New York, and won several matches.”

Free-floating took off during the decades after WWII, partly due to the rising popularity of benchrest shooting. This resulted in plenty of arguments, some so heated they might have ended abruptly if dueling had still been legal.
The rancor reached a peak in 1964 when Winchester introduced the push-feed version of their Model 70 with a very free-floated barrel. Traditionalists were ticked off, including Jack O’Connor, who claimed the barrel/forend gap could hide a well-fed rat.

However, several gun writers reported the new version shot very accurately. It would be interesting to know what Colonel Whelen’s reaction would have been, but he passed away in 1961.

Another factor also resulted in some debate. Epoxy was developed a few years before WWII, and after the war some shooters started using it for bedding stocks, including amateur gunsmiths who “sporterized” the zillions of war-surplus bolt-actions that could be purchased cheaply even into the 1960s. Since tight inletting from action tang to forend tip remained highly regarded by some shooters, stocks were often “glass-bedded” the same way.

“Glass” was short for fiberglass, developed in 1932 when a researcher for an Illinois company accidentally sent a jet of compressed air across molten glass, blowing off tiny fibers. These new-fangled fibers were added to epoxies to provide support the cured resins, the reason many rifle loonies still talk about “glass bedding,” though today many epoxies use other reinforcing materials, including tiny particles of steel.

Epoxy offered a quick and easy way to bed bolt-action stocks, though eventually free-floating eliminated the supposed need to bed the entire barreled action. However, many gunsmiths—both professional and amateur—continued to epoxy-bed it all, often with metal tubes called “pillars” surrounding the action screws.

Today some epoxy-bedders believe the only way to get the most accuracy from a bolt rifle is to fully bed the action with pillars. However, the reason pillars initially appeared was to reinforce stocks that could be crushed too much screw torque, whether 98 Mauser military rifles stocked in relatively soft wood, or early synthetic stocks that were essentially a hollow shell made of fiberglass cloth and epoxy.

Benchrest shooters started using those very light pillar-bedded fiberglass, in order to lighten their rifles, so heavier barrels could be used and still make competition weight limits. Many shooters reasoned that pillars improved accuracy—but if the stock isn’t compressible pillars don’t necessarily improve accuracy, whether the material is synthetic or hard wood.
A good example is the most accurate factory rifle I have ever owned, a Remington 700 Varmint model in .223 Remington with a laminated stock. When new, I epoxy-bedded the rear of the recoil lug and completely floated the barrel, and with ammo loaded using benchrest techniques the .223 would average five shots in .25 inch at 100 yards—close to competitive benchrest accuracy.

Would the rifle have shot more accurately if pillars had been added? I very much doubt it—especially since many of today’s benchrest rifles don’t feature pillars. Instead their actions are usually epoxied directly into the stock.
Another bedding technique became stylish during this period, a metal insert in the stock designed to firmly contact at least the front and rear of the action, and sometimes everywhere in between. Since both the “bedding block” and rifle actions could vary slightly in dimensions, many shooters soon started “skim bedding” the blocks with a thin layer of epoxy.

This obsession with full action contact began due to both the early fixation on “fine workmanship” and the flexibility of many early bolt actions—especially 98 Mausers. Many still consider the 98 the epitome of controlled-feed actions, but the action’s not nearly as stiff as newer actions. The military version, with the thumb-slot in the left receiver wall for pushing stripper clips into the magazine, can bend pretty easily.

In fact, the 98 and similar older actions can flex enough just from tightening the front action screw to affect the contact of the bolt’s locking lugs inside the receiver ring. This can definitely result in mediocre accuracy, and is why “glass” bedders often also bedded the rear inch or two of the barrel, preventing the action from flexing.

However, bedding any part of the barrel became unnecessary in most (but not all) bolt actions long ago, due to a slight change in design, apparently pioneered in the revered pre-1964 Model 70 Winchester. The Winchester bolt rifle that preceded the 70, 1925’s Model 54, followed the same action-screw/recoil lug placement as the 98 Mauser and 1903 Springfield, but in the Model 70 the front action screw was moved behind the recoil lug, underneath the bolt lugs.
This prevented bending the front of the action during tightening, eliminating the need to bed the rear of the barrel. Yet many shooters still do it, despite most modern bolt actions having the front screw behind the recoil lug, and plenty of evidence that it makes no difference, including today’s benchrest rifles.

In fact, many modern bolt actions don’t benefit from bedding anything but the rear of recoil lug, including the round-action Remington 700/721/722s that helped kill off the pre-’64 M70. Some newer bolt-actions are even stiffer than 700s, often both the receiver and bolt. Many also feature three or more locking lugs to minimize action-stresses during firing. As a result they do not require tight bedding of the entire action, and actually contact the stock very little, much like the epoxy-bedding job on my Remington 700 .223. One example is the Ruger American Rifle—which in many ways is the bolt-action equivalent of the 6.5 Creedmoor, the cartridge so many shooters love, or love to hate

The RAR’s round action doesn’t even have a recoil lug. Instead the bottom is milled slightly, fore and aft, to fit into steel V-blocks imbedded in the stock. Combined with a heavy, 3-lugged bolt, and the excellent hammer-forged barrels Ruger has made for three decades now, this results in very fine accuracy—at a very low price. (Well, as long as the barrel is actually free-floated in the injection-molded stock. Many of the early stocks were so flexible the barrels could still tap the forend during firing. Later stocks were stiffer.)

In fact, the two most accurate 6.5 Creedmoors I’ve fired were a pair of Ruger American Predators, with slightly heavier barrels than the standard model—and I’ve played with 8-10 Creedmoors, including a couple of semi-custom models costing around 10 times as much as an RAR. In fact, the very first 100-yard group fired with the first Predator put five shots into .33 inch at 100 yards.

A number of other inexpensive rifles made today also feature bedding systems that resemble the 98 Mauser about as much as humans resemble zebras. Like the Ruger American Rifle, many don’t even have recoil lugs. Another example is the Franchi Momentum, featuring a single steel V-block at the front of the action (which like the RAR is milled to fit the block) and at the rear an unpillared, solid portion of the injection-molded stock to support the action’s wide tang.
Guess what? Momentums also shoot very well: One I used on a mule deer hunt in New Mexico a few years ago fired a 4-shot group of a little over an inch—at 300 yards, with factory ammunition. (The chambering was 6.5 Creedmoor, and the ammo Hornady Precision Hunter featuring the 143-grain ELD-X.)

In the Tikka T3 action, the recoil “lug” is essentially a very small, square rod mating with a in the underside of the action. Oh, and Tikkas also have an excellent reputation for accuracy, right out of the box, at an “affordable” price. Of course, part of their accuracy comes from the same hammer-forged barrels used on Sakos, produced at the factory that makes both brand of rifle in Riihimaki, Finland.

Other actions don’t even have a conventional front action-screw. The Mauser M18 has a threaded stud permanently fitted to the front of the action, attached to the stock with a typical hexagonal nut.

I suspect doing away with a traditional, relatively large recoil lug enhances accuracy. In his 2000 book Rifle Accuracy Facts, author Harold R. Vaughn (a professional rocket scientist and an amateur rifle loony) traced one of the factors in “inaccuracy” to the conventional recoil lug on the Remington 721 .270 Winchester he used in his extensive tests. He determined the relatively long lug actually caused the front of the action to flex slightly during firing, which flipped the barrel up and down slightly, the devised a method to mitigate it.

As a result of Vaughan’s conclusion, it makes sense to reduce or even eliminate the recoil lug, minimizing action flex, especially in thicker-diameter actions. This is essentially what many modern bolt actions do—along with minimizing bedding contact, which also reduces the potential for action-flexing due a slightly mismatched receiver and bedding surface.

Of course, many older shooters still resent these changes in “classic” bolt-action design—in large part because the changes reduce manufacturing costs, allowing “cheap” rifles to shoot very well. This also angered traditionalists in the years just after WWII, when Remington used engineering and manufacturing simplifications developed during the war when designing the Remington 721 and 722—which retailed for less than 75% of the price of a new Winchester Model 70. Yet the “cheap” Remington rifles often shot more accurately than the classically designed and manufactured Model 70s.

This is also why the 721/722 and the Remington 700 (a fancier version of the 721/722) became perhaps the most abundant commercial bolt-action rifles ever made, one reason Remington actions (and many “700 clone” actions, like the Bergara’s) are probably used as the basis for more custom rifles than any other action. This is also why so many companies manufacture after-market parts to fit Remington actions, including magazines, triggers and even bolts, and so many new non-700 actions are contoured to accept 721/722/700 scope bases.

This is all part of the tweak & tune that a gun tinkerer will do to customize a rifle to its best potential. There are no hard and fast rules, every rifle can be, and mostly is, different.

A pressure point can be removed, and can be replaced.

A barrel can be completely free floated, or the shank bedded, or it can even be fully bedded. The only way to know is take the time and make the effort to try it. Put it back if something makes it worse.

Thinking my results will be your results is probably not the route to take.

Thank you MD and everyone else. Very interesting article and comments. Am going to take the time and do as Feral suggests.

Good post.

Moral of the story, for me anyway, is you need to start with a proper foundation: That means properly glass bedded action. That means, with a Remington 700, when you pull the barreled action out of the stock, the bedding will look like the barreled action was poured into the stock and fits perfectly. Proper glass bedding may look different, depending on what rifle manufacture you're talking about. But the key thing is the receiver needs to be laying in the stock in a neutral stress free state. That also means when you crank down on the action screws, that does NOT stress the receiver in any way shape or form. To me, it sounds like the OP is asking about a Sako that has a freefloated barrel. Nothing at all wrong with that. The thing he needs to be focusing on is the lack of glass bedding under the receiver. Even if it was glass bedded from the factory, it still may not be optimum. That is the number 1 thing that needs to be looked at. Not whether or not the barrel is freefloated. Generally most rifles with good barrels prefer a freefloated barrel. Especially with large shot strings (10 or more shots per group).

On the Remington 700's, 788's, 721', 722's that I've had, I always glass bed the whole receiver, because it's cylindrical and it needs all the help it can get. I also bed the recoil lug tight. Whether or not you leave the whole barrel floated or not, that is up to you and the individual rifle. Generally on a Remington, I'll glass bed under the chamber area too, shoot it and see if the rifle likes it. If not, I'll relieve that area, and shoot again. Some rifles that have been problematic, have needed a little upward pressure out at the tip of the forend too. That can easily be tested with business cards slipped in between the stock and the barrel. Adding cards, until the proper pressure is achieved. Then epoxy in a small pad. I've seen older rifles with skinny barrels react well to this method. Those are barrels that have stress induced from the machining process, and you can't fix that, unless you replace the barrel, so you learn to work around it by adding a pressure pad in the stock. I'm not going to mention how I glass bed my model 70's because the OP asked specifically about Rem 700's. His new Sako may need attention where it deserves: Propper glass bedding under the receiver.

I’m in a totally different arena of thought than most people.

If it’s a synthetic stock, and the firearm will be used for hunting (hot, cold, snow, ice, typical hunting debris) …….I want a fully bedded barrel.

Fully bedded, helps eliminate any materials from entering the barrel channel. This can be especially problematic if water gets into the channel and then freezes. The debris or the frozen water can cause a pressure point, which could affect the barrel harmonics….thereby affecting the zero or possibly affect the rifle’s group capabilities.

Perhaps I’m overly paranoid….but, it’s one less thing that concerns me when hunting! memtb

Most of the rifles I've played with have been Mausers of one sort or another. t started when a friend (?) sold me an FN commercial Mauser in .270 Win. The rifle just didn't shoot worth a damn One day, I bought a glass bedding kit and bedded the flat area behind the recoil lug and about two inches from the face of the receiver. I also free floated the barrel and frankly, not knowing any better at the time made one hell of a hog wallow. The rifle as it sits shoots some very tight groups. The barrel is one of the skinniest 24" ones I've ever seen except for a cigarette rifle I have that was rebarreled by P.O. Ackley; also in .270 Win. I suppose I could bed the barrel enough to make the free float not so obvious but considering how well it shout? I'll leave it alone. The stock on the rifle would probably cause the late Jack O'Connor spin in his grave.
I have bedded a couple of other Mausers in the same manner as that .270 and they also improved in accuracy. Works for me anyway.
Paul B.

There is no best imo. It’s what’s appropriate for the situation. Plastic stocks need ( imo ) an inch or so in front of the receiver. It shortens the flimsy stock forearm thereby adding some stiffness to it. Mitigates the barrel from touching the fore end under recoil or while loading a bi pod. ( also when in a sling )

Good stiff stocks don’t require any glass in front of the receiver of a 700 depending on the barrel weight. I don’t think it hurts though to have some glass ahead of the receiver.

No, usually it doesn't "hurt" to epoxy-bed stocks for an inch or so in front of the receiver on 700s, but it also generally doesn't matter. Know this from epoxy-bedding a bunch of 700s over the decades. (Wouldn't even guess at how many.) The first was a 700 ADL .270 with a walnut stock in the mid-1970s--which would then group three shots of its "pet" load into around an inch--at 300 yards.

Dunno what stocks you're calling plastic. Do you mean injection-molded? Some of them are very stiff. It depends on the "plastic" mix.

The “flimsy” ones MD

OK!

tag

Since reading what JB has said about bedding in Gun Gack I started bedding the lug only on 700s, without bedding that first 2 inches of barrel. Sho'nuff...it works just fine....