Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Ask The Gunwriters How come Ruger 77`s get no respect????

Now Klik you know you can't use a wood/blue rifle in Alaska.

I like Ruger rifles, got a feeling my next will be a Ruger too.

My exposure to Ruger M77's dates back to their introduction,and once the long action came out I quickly had a 270,30/06,and a 7 Rem Mag.These were original rifles and I can't recall accuracy issues with the early ones.

It was not unusual for special runs to be made and I got a 257 Roberts that I used for a lot of woodchuck hunting here in New England. It was fussy but I found a couple of loads that shot well and used the rifle a lot.These all went west with me druing the 70's and I killed pronghorn out to 400 yards or so, and my biggest mule deer to date near Durango with a 270.

Somewhere in here quality started to slip,and several guys who had grabbed 7x57's complained loud and long....seems the throats were like the Holland Tunnel and bullets had to make long jumps to the lands,and would not shoot, or were very fussy.I hear Wilson barrels were also faulted for the accuracy issues.But one friend put a 7 mag in a synthetic stock and used it on everything out west...another 270 was very accurate.

They started making their own barrels when the Mark II action came out,and on the exact same hammer forging machinery used by Remington and Winchester,sourced out of Germany IIRC;but I have not owned many since then that I remember.I have had a Ruger African that shot well,and a 7 mag that did likewise within the last few years.

The rifles are bomb proof...seems nothing ever breaks,you can't kill them, and like most factory offerings sometimes need tweaking to get them to shoot.I guess in a day and age when shooters expect tiny groups from cheap rifles,they may not get this with a Ruger M77.But they seem to shoot well enough,and I would trust one far more as a hunting rifle to keep trucking under bad conditions than most anything else out there today that comes over the counter.

I'm a M70 guy but,otherwise, for something dependable,for me,over the counter, it would be a Ruger M77 Mark II.

One thing that hurt the early 77s was Ruger's bloody minded CS. They built a lot of guns they knew would not shoot accurately and would look you in eye and say 4MOA was plenty adequate for hunting so go way! That 'rule of thumb' by old Bill still has ocassional echoes if you get the wrong person on the wrong day at Ruger, but more recently they generally have cleaned up sloppy chambers andnolonger buy the cheapest -- and often bad-- barrels on offer. These days, Ruger very often will fix accuracy problems gratis too.

Back when I owned a lot of 77s I had several of the much admired here mod 1 77s -- in 7x57 and .35 Whelen. Both were disgraceful scatter guns as was a 22 Hornet VHZ until I had it K-ed.

The bad rep lives on, well beyond it's valid shelf life.

1b

It's interesting how the rifles are built to the same paradigm as the handguns - tough, not too polished in operation or anything else, okay to good OOTB accuracy, with cast frames (someone correct me if the handguns aren't cast).

Yet folks view the rifles on the same level as a worthy wrench and hammer but unworthy of much gussying up and certainly not worthy of being in the same room with custom pre-64's and various custom Mausers, while praises are sung for those who turn the handguns into high art.





If the human race is ever consistent in its outlook I'll know the end times are near...

I have built a few semi-custom rifles (custom barrels in glass stocks) on 77 actions and don't really mind the actions. However, I like a lot of other actions better.
I've built a couple of target rifle on 77's and they shot as well as any other commercial repeater action.
There are some design features which I think are quite clever and which set the Rugers apart. The first is the angled guard screw; I like it. The second feature is the bolt stop. Although it falls short of being attractive, it is a robust, simple, and function piece. The cushioning effect of the stop prevents deformation of the left lug from rapidfire use.
Ruger has carefully avoided making a decent trigger and I would have liked to have seen a different scope mounting system. The Talley dovetailed rings would have been much nicer IMO. Virtually any trigger system would be an improvement.
It is a bit difficult to make a really attractive 77. The receiver shape is a bit homely and surfaces are often so badly polished they can't be straightened up.
Feeding issues are not uncommon in any chambering.
I thought the first stocks were pretty decent but they bulked up in the late seventies and remained fat and homely.
I have a tang safety 7x57 right now. I re-shaped the stock and set the barrel back and re-chambered to correct the too-long throat and a slightly eccentric chamber. The rifle shot quite well but the barrel wasn't real pretty inside. I re-barreled it with a new Lothar Walther barrel and turned it from a pretty good shooter into the worst shooting rifle I own! I have never had a barrel foul so badly and so quickly. I have done little except walk by the rack and glare at it for a while but I think I'll lap the darn thing and see what I can accomplish. It's really kind of a nice looking rifle but it's hard to like it right now. GD

My favorite Ruger is an older tang safety RS 35 Whelen that I have thrown in a Bansner stock. I have killed critters using the 250 Speer (black bear) and Partition (black bear, nilgai and hogs) but settled on the 225 gr TSX (elk, moose, hogs and deer) some years ago. It shoots the TSX least accurate of the three bullets only averaging 1 5/8" or so (three shots). I have not "worked" up a load with the TSX, just went straight to the Barnes max and mag box max and took it hunting in northern BC. I am sure I can dial the TSX in given time which is always lacking. Doubt I will given the results.

And yes, Jim, agree on the paradox with Ruger sixguns. Particularly given that, IME, sixgun loony's are loonier than rifle loony's. They do make into very fine revolvers though.

I have used Ruger's as my go-to hunting rifles since 1994. Still waiting on the first malfunction. They are tough and uterly reliable, which is why I chose them in the first place.

The early M77 stocks were designed by Lenard Brownell & are quite svelt and nicely profiled. By the mid seventies, the stocks gained weight & size and didn't feel nearly as nice when handled. In the early eighties, the stocks were put on a diet & returned to a similar profile to the early stock design. The new Hawkeye wood stocks are the best they've produced to date.

Man ,I think I got some wood lookin at this porn!!!!

M77s look wonderful, but a rifle that won't shoot MOA is useless IMO. Ruger handguns are nice except their double action revolvers.

IMO is definitely the operative part of that sentence.

While shooting MOA with Ruger rifles doesn't seem to be all that unusual - even for me!- I find the idea that one needs an MOA capable rifle to kill things bigger than ground hogs woefully short of real-world experience.

Tack drivers do promote confidence. The benefit of which is hard to quantify.

But as Klik pointed out, 1.5" rifles will do just fine in 99% of hunting scenarios if you do your part.

This issue of investment castings for gun parts by Ruger and others comes up once in a while. I have found investment castings to be reliable in my experience.

I was a purchasing manager at two very large manufacturing companies here in the USA. One is one of the largest tool manufacturing companies in the world.

We made some of our tool parts from investment castings. Most of the metals were alloy steel which where finish machined by us and heat treated and further finished as required.

These were reliable parts and we never had any problem with them.

One of my vendors was the Pine Tree Co. of New Hampshire. I toured their New Hampshire plant and it was very well run. It had almost a military feel to it up there being very clean etc.

Rugers castings were very good and of course they had won the bid.

For someone to disparage investment castings for well engineered parts of any machine they should be more specific.

http://www.ruger.com/casting/index.html





S99

+1, smack on. As a guy who's had a number of these rifles over the last 37 years, the shooters outnumber the dogs five to one, and all of the rifles that wouldn't shoot were pre-90 vintage. I have three now, all shoot very well, sub-MOA (.220 Swift, 30/06, .338 Win Mag...and the Swift and '06 are significantly sub-MOA). All that said, as Klikitarik said, in the game fields this is a ridiculous discussion. I'd take a 1.5 to 2 MOA rifle that held zero day in/day out, year after year, to a one holer I was constantly worried over where the group was going to be.

Amen!

I value first shot out of cold bore consistency MUCH more than multi shot grouping ability for my hunting rifles.

A few days after I turned 18 in 1986 I bought a new tang safety Ruger M77 7mm rem mag. I was very proud of that rifle and eventually killed a lot of deer with it. However, it was at best a 3" rifle at 100 yds. I reloaded for it for many years and ran hundreds of dollars worth of powder and bullets through it trying to make it shoot to no avail, it just wasn't going to shoot better than 3" consistently. Rarely would I ever have a situation where I'd need to shoot more than 150 yds, and my old 30-30 would have certainly done as well as the Ruger at the ranges I used it. A 3" rifle kind of handicaps a flat shooting round like a 7mm rem mag if you actually needed to use it to it's capabilities. I loved the way the rifle felt and handled, and the tang safety is where ALL rifles should have them, they made them considerably less attractive to me when they moved the safety. It was a good looking rifle, much nicer looking than the california pimp style that was in vogue at the time with huge monte carlo's and white line spacers. If I could have gotten that rifle to shoot halfway decently I might have continued buying Rugers, but nowadays a rifle doesn't interest me unless it shoots well, and you pretty much had to be inside the barn to hit it with that rifle.

How much more "specific" does one need to be? You hear it all the time.....If they can't convince you they are a POS because of that, they will try the "they shoot like chit, their barrels are crap, they are too heavy I can't pack them around because I'm a [bleep] puzzy". I hope that was more specific for you now....Here's what a poster said just a few minutes ago in one of swampy's threads:



This was just posted minutes ago.....and I've heard it many times....was I wrong or do you need more "specifics"?...

I've got a boat paddle .270 KM77MKII, hits to point of aim EVERY time from a cold barrel. That's with three different scopes, any number of hand or factory loads. All light bullet factory loads shoot 3/4 to 1 1/2, some heavies about 2. Hand loads with Magpro or R22 shoot 5/8 to 3/4 groups, some times better. Put a Timmney trigger, Decel pad, and bedded (good thing I didn't know they were impossable to bed with that action screw ). I like the looks of the action better than a M700. I like not having to have multi element rings and bases. I've never had a feed issuse. Just throw it in the truck or jeep and go. Would not hesitate to buy another.