building a thousand-yard rifle for $1000 is no easy feat building one for $500
which is our challenge it's just a little bit nutty and bear in mind that
this is not a theoretical 1,000 yards we are actually going to be competing with
this rifle in a 600 yard match and at 1,000 yard match over at Tulsa's red
castle gun club adding to the difficulty of this build I won't be going out and
trying to find bargains on use parts I'm not going to go find some target action
that someone's trying to get rid of this is all going to be off the rack stuff
that you can buy in your local sporting goods store the optics you may be able
to find on amazon.com that sort of thing this is all stuff that you can buy and
build now fortunately we have four excellent deer rifles that we can choose
from at this point first there's the savage axis and kind of its part be the
axis - we have the Mossberg Patriot there's the Ruger American and then
there's the Remington 783 all of these are known to be very accurate and really
they're all based off the savage axis they all have kind of the same barrel
profile they all attach to the action via the barrel nut and most of them have
a version of the active trigger this out the base model savage axis does not but
the access to does and everybody else has some kind of variant of the a Q
trigger so what did I end up getting let's just get right down to it this is
the bog standard savage axis this is not the axis - so it does not have that nice
a Q trigger now the reason that I went with this is largely because of money if
we're going to build an entire rifle including optics base and with all of
these all of them have a plastic stock that needs to be thrown out so we have
to get some kind of laminate stock in order to make that budget of $500 I had
to go with one of the cheaper options there were some that included scopes
that I didn't really want that sort of thing so the packages didn't really work
out for me but this axis is going to work very well
actually I believe the other rifles I mentioned all owe their existence to the
savage axis they are all essentially clones especially once you take a look
at how these are designed you start with a supporter weight barrel which is going
to be standard anywhere but it's attached to a simple kind of tubular
action via this a barrel nut this makes head spacing much more
precise and much easier to do and you get a lot of cast parts like this this
bolt handle the detachable magazine includes some plastic in some metal
parts the worst feature on all of these rifles is the plastic stock I'm sure
they're perfectly comfortable and capable when it comes to hunting if
you're taking offhand shots or kneeling or whatever but when it comes to the
prone these stocks are terrible first off they're all pretty flexible so you
can actually move the fore arm until it touches the barrel quite easily
another big detraction is the ambidextrous nature of these stocks
these are meant to be easy to make and to easily conform to right-handed or
left-handed sportsmen alike so what they do is they just kind of drop the comb
here so that it it pretty well fits everybody's faces and it works pretty
well but especially for a prone competition rifle you want cast off and
you want can't you want this thing fitted specifically to you to me the
biggest organ amma Krait here this is going to be a fine stock for hunting you
can easily get your thumb over the top to hit the safety it's also going to
work well if you're taking offhand shots especially if you're leaning forward
but this is going to be terrible if you're in the prone position this is
really going to kink your wrist up what you want is a much more vertical grip
those of you that have shot ar-15s or other kind of modern semi-automatic
rifles you know how comfortable that more
vertical hand grip is especially when you're in the prone and this is going to
help us to relieve a lot of tension when we're firing in the match we won't
have our wrists all bound up and there won't be any discomfort I will put
together a full evaluation video of the savage axis so we can take a look at its
advantages and disadvantages but for now the big one I think is just going to be
the trigger the trigger is abominable it's awful it's so heavy that I keep
checking myself to see if the safety is actually on it's that heavy and then
once it actually starts moving it just kind of grinds and grinds and then
finally snaps it is a terrible terrible trigger aside from that though I think
this is going to be a good platform just fix up the trigger throw out the stock
which is what I would do with any of the other rifles anyway and I think we
should be in good shape aside from the quality of the barrels the barrel nut
that allows precise head spacing and some pretty good bedding despite the
fact that these are plastic stocks one of the big reasons why all the rifles
that I've mentioned are accurate probably comes down to this right here
the floating bolt head this allows the locking lugs to stay flush to stay true
to the the cutouts here in the action even if the barrel moves are the the
bolt moves around a little bit and it can move a bit as the trigger is pulled
or just with gravity as you're taking a shot gravity can pull the back of the
bolt down and it can change spacing within the chamber area so this floating
bolt head makes sure that nothing really moves around in the chamber that the the
lugs are always flush and the bolt face is always nicely spaced within the
chamber one of the reasons I did not choose the Ruger American is that the
other rifles that Remington the Mossberg the savage all of them have this
floating bolt head the Ruger American does not it's all a one-piece solid bolt
and that puts it at a slight disadvantage against these others as I
was narrowing down the list of rifles to come up with my final selection I took a
look at the Boyd's selection of rifle stocks and one of the things that
disqualified the Remington 783 for me is that it only had hunter style stocks in
laminate now any laminate stock that's well-built is going to be nice and
sturdy and it's going to be plenty accurate but because of that grip angle
that I mentioned before I decided to discard the 783 from the list the axis
on the other hand has a wonderful varmint stock available and it comes
with two different barrel channels that you can choose since I'm going to stick
with this barrel profile I can't replace the barrel for the prices that we're
working with they will cut a sporter profile barrel channel in that stock but
you can also ask for a thicker kind of varmint cutout so you can go with larger
barrels converting this savage axis into a decent competition rifle is not going
to be easy it's going to take a lot of steps so
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