I love savage rifles but if there's one thing that's holding back the maximum
accuracy potential of these budget rifles like the savage axis it's going
to be the plastic stock it's a little bit flexible and even though this does
feel better than the stock that they've had on previous budget models like the
Stevens 200 I still would not want to trust this in a competition and that's
actually what I'm doing with this rifle if you're following the series you know
that I am turning this into a 1,000 yard competition rifle and I'll actually be
testing this in a 600 yard and a thousand yard match later this year if
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everything in it at the time that I'm producing this video
there are really only a few options for replacement stocks for the axis they're
going to be four different shapes from Boyd's
there's the classic and then the Prairie Hunter which drops the heel in the toe
just a little bit compared to the classic and both of those I will not
consider just because of their shape they have this this hunter-style grip
which is going to be very uncomfortable in the prone as the counts start rising
you can see that if I'm trying to keep my hand on the grip and keep my elbow on
the ground in a prone style and stance you'll see that it's
just very uncomfortable on the wrist and it doesn't present a very flush pull on
the trigger so we're not going to do that thankfully boyd's has two different
other shapes they have the featherweight thumb hole which starts to go just a
little bit more vertical and then you have the pro varmint which I think used
to actually be called the tacticool and it has a very vertical grip up here and
it's going to have a very easy reach to the trigger there is one other option
from m.d. qi chassis so if you wanted chassis sis
instead of a more traditional you know laminate wood type of stock they do have
that which i think is made of aluminum and it's called the LSS chassis it's
going to be more expensive it's about four hundred bucks for that whereas the
Boyd's they're going to cost I think there are a hundred forty four dollars a
piece and then you have shipping on top of that so we're going to go with the
laminate since we do have such a tight budget in this series let's see what we
ended up with I chose to order the Boyd's Pro varmint which looks a lot
like a manner stock or a McMillan a5 it has this nice kind of vertical grip
right here it has a pretty high cheek piece a little bit of a toe hook right
here and it has a nice wide forearm which is going to be really stable on
bags this is going to be an excellent prone shape underneath this black
textured paint is a blonde laminate included in the purchase price our three
swivel studs a plastic trigger loop and this seems to be the same shape as the
the model ten trigger loop so if we want to swap this out for metal at some point
we can spend an extra ten or twelve bucks to do that there is a bead for the
safety a little piece of what appears to be plexiglass epoxy into the stock for
the rear mag catch up here is the recoil lug which seems to be permanently
affixed inside the stock here and then we have one more piece that comes with
it and that is the front mag catch and the the recoil screw the action screw
actually goes right up through this and holds it in place this is not actually
permanently affixed to the stock as it ships from Boyd's this is ninety percent
of what I need to perform in the competitions but before this is really
ready I need to do three different types of modifications to this first I'm going
to need to do some functional fixes on this I'll need to do some organic
modifications and then finally if I have some time
I'll do some aesthetic ones so first off on the functional side I want to make
sure that there is enough room in this barrel channel so that I have plenty of
relief around the barrel and I've already put this action into the stock
and there is just a little bit of closeness between the left side of the
barrel channel and the barrel itself and under firing that may actually cause
some contact so I'm going to relieve this barrel channel just a little bit
also on the functional side I want to make sure that I have a good strong
connection between the stock and the the action so I'll be putting in steel
spacers here and here some steel pillars and I'm also going to be putting in an
epoxy bedding so that instead of just using the natural surface here I'm going
to use a curved surface in here that mates perfectly with the action I'm also
going to need to relieve the trigger well just a little bit because this does
not allow our trigger modifications to fix so I'll just need to grind some of
that out with a dremel tool on the ergonomic side of things this rifle is
pretty well set up I do have some issues with the the comb right here this cheek
piece has just a little bit too much material which is a great way to go if
you're gonna do anything have a little bit too much material and then you can
easily scale it back but if I get my cheek on this comb and I look down the
rifle I'm not looking directly over the action screws like I should be instead
I'm kind of looking a little bit off to the left so what I'm gonna have to do is
just remove some material just a little bit on this side of the cheek piece and
then I should be in good shape and we'll see how the height looks but I think
that this height is going to work pretty well I'm running some pretty low scope
rings the grip overall is pretty good but again I'd like to make just a few
modifications have kind of concave hand you can see
that it's pretty dished out when I'm holding my hand like this I just don't
have a lot of meat on it so I do like a good bit more palm swell then a lot of
folks like and this is pretty flat through here now I can't go adding
material to the grip what I'm going to have to do instead is remove material
around this area especially on the back side of the grip right here I'm going to
take some of this away so that the heel of my hand can kind of fall in here and
this will just feel a little bit better also on the organ aam excited thing
since we're looking at this kind of buttstock area my length of pole is 14
and a half inches I am 6 foot 2 so I have pretty long arms and this is coming
in at 14 inches which is really good for a and off-the-line stock it's not that
often that you see a 14 inch length of pull and just as a reminder for those
that don't know about this the length of pull is the distance from the front of
the trigger face to the back of the butt pad and yeah for me it's 14 and a half
inches so what I can do is just add a couple of spacers back here and that
should fix that issue I don't really have any issues ergonomically with the
the forearm here because this is really just going to be sitting in a rest or on
a bipod or something like that this is not going to be an off hand sort of
rifle if I do go in that direction I might do some things to maybe narrow
down this stock you can see that right here especially toward the fore tip look
at how wide the these little rails are on either side of the barrel channel it
leaves a lot of room so if you do put in a bull barrel at a later date or a
varmint barrel you have plenty of room to do that but it does look like it's
still pretty excessive so if I do turn this into you know more of a game
style rifle at some point then I'll probably shave that off but for now this
is great the final modifications are purely aesthetic if you look down
this cut right here you can see that this is not straight at all this was all
milled out at the factory on some kind of CNC mill and it looks like I don't
know if there was just some kind of wiggle and what was going on or if the
program wasn't that great you can see that it's it's really not straight it's
quite wavy and it happens on both sides of the rifle see if you can see that
pretty well and there's just a lot of little things that are not symmetrical
about this rifle you can see that that's looking straight down on the top of the
comb here that the two sides are not the same even though I imagined that this
was designed to be a an ambidextrous type of stock and then all they do is
just cut out a different bolt handle notch on each side but yeah these these
are not consistent so I'd probably want to square up some of these things like
here's another good one right here you can see that this side of the stock this
little rail is quite fat and then suddenly it just kind of slopes off and
gets skinny back here and over here this one stays kind of wide these really need
to be just made symmetrical and they need to be made straight if this is
something that you know I want to feel proud about later we'll see if I have
time for those kinds of mods also we have what may be the fattest wrist I
have ever seen on a rifle stock the tang of this rifle
is going to come in right here it's going to end right here and we're left
with this really big fat wrist so I'll show you some footage of my 12 F V stock
and what I did to the wrist on that thing to make it just a bit more of an
elegant smooth curve it's going to fit just a little bit better when I go to
reach up for the safety it's going to just feel a little better there but
mostly it's for looks and the savage axis like I've mentioned before is a
particularly ugly rifle so if I can do anything to help
offset that ugliness you know possibly by making this line a little smoother
just kind of cut through here and roll all this a little further up toward that
tang then maybe I can make that axis a little bit less gopping it's difficult
to see through the camera but the forearm tip is also not quite square so
I think I'm going to be fixing that the reshaping work is naturally going to
take this wonderful textured kind of pebbled looking black finish off the
rifle so I will need to refinish this I might stain and reseal it or I might do
some kind of Dura coat job those of you have seen some of my older videos you
know that I've done some dirt coat camouflage that's pretty effective but
who knows I might take this in a different direction we'll see
you