welcome back to our thousand yard rifle experiment we're for a total
budget of five hundred dollars including the price of this rifle we'll be turning
a savage axis into a gun that I feel confident competing with at a six
hundred yard and a thousand yard match out at Tulsa's red castle gun club now
naturally it's going to take a lot of work to turn this into a rifle I feel
comfortable firing at those kinds of ranges so make sure that you subscribe
to the social regressive so that you can see all the upcoming videos if you'd
like us on Facebook you can see some behind the scenes footage and then
finally this playlist is going to have everything that we do to this rifle now
in the last video we discussed why I picked a savage axis over some very good
competition the Remington 783 the Mossberg Patriot
the savage access to the Ruger American I chose a base savage axis over those
mostly because of cost but also because of the things that I know it can fix on
here and the things that I know are right so in this video we're gonna take
a step back to the bench here and we're going to take a look at the distinct
advantages and disadvantages of the axis and what we have to do to get this
battle ready let's start off with just some general notes and the first thing
I'm going to say is pretty controversial I find this rifle to be rather ugly I
think it's go opping this is pretty typical of savage where you have this
bolt handle that just kind of falls right off and the whole effect is that
the rifle ends up kind of looking like a hunchback the stock is just kind of
hanging off the back of this it looks weird but unusual savage form this thing
is very light it's comfortable the balance is nice and you might think that
these little finger grooves were cut here just for appearance they try to
take away from the the basic tubular nature of the action and make it look
like there's something going on and you'll be partially right but this is
actually very functional these things feel nice and you can as
you can see you get a lot of real estate up here so you can easily get your hand
back if that's the way you like to take your shots if you want to get a bit more
control on the forearm you can easily grab out here and then back on the
trigger hand these little finger cutouts work really well the bolt throw is usual
very slick it's cock-on open so there's gonna be a
little bit of tension when you first lift the bolt but it's still very smooth
it's a push feed and yeah you don't have to worry about any thing slowing down as
things lock into place it's gonna be really smooth zeroing in on just the
stock I have to say that I think they did a really good job with this their
previous budget rifle the Stevens 200 had a very basic floppy stock and this
is not that it's still pretty flexible especially you're right up here on the
forearm it's just a little bit too easy to flex this forearm until it touches
the barrel it's free floated all the way through here and I think that as long as
you're taking off hand shots like I mentioned in the other video I think
it'll be fine if however you're gonna be putting this
on a bipod or doing anything else that's gonna stress that forearm I wouldn't
really trust to the the stiffness of this forearm as for the rest of it yeah
it's all pretty comfortable now it is ambidextrous like I mentioned in the
other video which is not really ideal this is nice for hitting the mass-market
it's gonna fit everybody decently well it's never going to fit anybody
particularly well the length of pull is 13 and a half inches and that's the
distance from the the buttstock right here to the trigger face now for those
of you that are taller like myself I'm 6 foot 2 and I have pretty long arms and I
don't have all that much muscle so I need a length of pull of about fourteen
and a half inches to be comfortable thirteen and a half is fine but this is
just one more reason why I'm going to throw out this whole stock and replace
it with a laminate the recoil pad looks good back here it's a little bit on the
squishy side but it's not too bad I think this one would actually feel
really darn good especially if you're going to be firing the the 308 or one
of the other kind of larger calibers this is I think gonna soak up a lot of
the recoil it has these cutouts here that aren't just for a visual appeal
they're gonna help to give a little bit but still provide some structure with
these little bands through here the underside of this rifle is actually
pretty interesting and we'll get into this discussion when we're looking at
the action but we have a magazine down here it's the usual double stack stamped
magazine it can hold I believe four rounds so you can have one in the
chamber four in the magazine and this is the the short action so anything that
has 308 as a parent case you're going to be able to fit four in this for a total
of five rounds the bottom of this is plastic but it's the same stuff as the
stock and I expected it's a pretty good plastic one thing that people have
complained about is this little tab right here that retains the magazine in
the stock and I could see if you were swapping out magazines a whole bunch
that might become an issue but it doesn't really move all that much
I wouldn't expect it to snap off that easily right here this trigger loop is
not the usual metal trigger loop that you can pop off this whole section is
one piece and this all comes out when you remove your your rear action screw
like I said we'll take a look at this one when you take a closer look at the
action because this is actually a really neat piece right here I've removed the
two actions screws so that we can take a good close look at this action in the
nude here it is one of the reasons that savage can offer such a good rifle at a
decent price is that they keep their machining pretty simple this is just a
tube of Steel with cutouts in the right places and one of the brilliant things
that they did with the savage axe is to make it is inexpensively as they do is
that they replay
the Tang that they usually have what we're looking at right here is an action
from the Stevens 200 this is kind of based on the old model 10 still tube
steel it's going to look very similar but when you get back here
you can see that the Tang this is still part of the action all of this has all
this machining going on through here and down here what they've done is they've
just chopped it off right here at the back and they've put in this cast tang
because you don't really need that this right here does a fine job of holding a
trigger mechanism and the sear safety all the good stuff back through here one
other really cool thing that savage was able to do with this action is they were
able to put this top strap in across the the top of the action because there was
a detachable magazine down here normally with the model tens of model twelves
they had to leave this top section open so you could actually load the rifle in
here you wouldn't be able to easily get a finger into to load your rounds but
since it does have that magazine that drops out you don't have to have this
massive cutout and you can get a little bit more rigidity up here the action and
the barrel both appear instead of being blued it looks like they have a
phosphate finish on the entire thing it's basically a parker ization process
this gives it a very flat black look in contrast with the kind of shiny blued
steel look that you get with the the older stevens or the model twelves or
any of the the full savage line i mentioned that we were going to talk
about this weird trigger loop and the fact that it's a part of this big
section of the stock here's why this action is both long action and short
action it's long enough to be able to feed your 30.6 and 270's
and eventually if they do magnums that'll probably work just fine for here
as well and usually the reason why you can't do that why you have to have two
different actions one for short action and one for long action is the magazine
down at the bottom so what these guys have done is they have two different
magazines they have a short and they have a long and what you can do is using
the same stock and using the same action all you have to do is just remove this
section of the stock if you want to go with a long action and replace it with a
different one that's just a little bit shorter right here so it'll still retain
the magazine and it'll fit neatly into the stock you already have you can
actually order this from savage from what I've heard just order this part you
can get a magazine through Brenna Brownells or one of those other
retailers and then you have a long action gun or if you want to go the
other way a short action let's take a look at the peculiar way that the action
connects to this stock you have a steel pillar at the front and you have a steel
pillar at the rear and that's pretty typical but what's missing is the usual
recoil lug here on this stevens you can see that the recoil lug is sandwiched
between the barrel nut and the action and here there is no recoil lug there's
just a little cutout in the action right there what they've opted to do instead
is to put the recoil lug here into the stock which is something that I had
never seen before I'd be curious to know if this was less expensive to machine or
just why they did this but hey it seems to work so no problem here as we finish
with this action we might as well point out that they did do a little bit of
something to try to make it look like it's not just a tube of steel they did
some pretty simple cutouts on each side you have this this great big slash
across the top and you have this flat cutout right here and really as far as I
can tell that is just for appearance to help it not look quite so bad you can
see that that slash extends on the other side too
yeah I don't think it really does anything but it does help a little bit
if you are accustomed to savage bolts this will look pretty familiar it just
has a few changes first off there's now a cocking indicator on the back of the
bolt right here and gone is this great big cam on the back of the bolt and it's
been replaced just by this little piece that's attached to the the actual bolt
handle now up on the front the gas lug is also a little bit different you can
see that this one is just a little bit fatter on both sides and this one has a
little bit of a cutout but the neat thing is that it looks like the bolt
head itself in the bolt face these are going to be interchangeable which is one
of the great things about Savage it's really easy to pop these off and change
them out so if you want to go to a different head size like say you want to
step one of these down to 223 or go in a Magnum direction then you can remove
these bolt heads and replace them with others in typical savage fashion you get
a very nice steel extractor and you get a plunger type ejector with a strong
spring under there I've never had a problem with one of the extractors I did
get into some overpressure loads and I damaged one of my ejector springs but
really that was my fault if you're used to firing savages you probably already
know that you get some primer cratering around that firing pin hole so for those
of you that aren't used to firing savages you might notice that it craters
a little bit that doesn't necessarily mean you're getting into overpressure it
just means that this bolt face is a little bit different like any other
Savage the tolerances between the bolt and the action are not actually all that
great it's pretty floppy there's you can actually hear it click around as I move
it and this makes for good quick throws you can easily get the bolt moving
around but usually this leads to a loss of precision in a rifle that's the cool
thing about Savage they have this workaround right here
the floating bolt head and I really think that this is what makes savages as
accurate they are what this does is it allows the
lugs it allows the whole head to remain flush to the cutouts here in the action
and if the bolt moves around which it always does it's going to pull down a
little bit with gravity as you're firing if there are any weird forces
like say if you're laying on your side or if the trigger is being pulled and
you know things are just being pressed around in here usually that's gonna pull
the bolt off sound but it doesn't matter because the bolt is only tenuously
attached to the head this is going to stay nice and flush you're not going to
change your chamber dimensions any and this still gets a nice precise lock up
the barrel nut here attaches this 22 inch sport or weight barrel to the
action and the really neat thing about the barrel nut is that allows us to get
really precise head spacing without having to do all that milling gymnastics
that usually have to go into a lot of actions to make the two made up really
well all you have to do is just take a barrel that's properly threaded you just
screw it on here use your gauges put the barrel nut on and then everything should
be headspace properly now the barrel here since it is a sport or weight it's
going to heat up really quickly and it's not going to dissipate heat very well
this is going to be a pretty big problem in our competition because remember
we're going to be launching 20 rounds at a time in a string at distances of 600
and a thousand yards and I have one minute per shot maximum so this thing is
going to get hot and this might lead to a little bit of dispersion as the match
goes along we'll see I think that this is going to hold up okay because I have
fired these sport or weight barrels I've put many rounds through them in sessions
before and it's done pretty darn well I think we'll be okay the savage sporter
profiles a little bit different than you get on a lot of others it's not going to
be quite as whippy because it just doesn't get as thin as fast
a lot of time they just cut right in and then you just get this pencil barrel all
the way out to the end this one is more of a gradual taper it's more like a cone
now one of the other problems with this barrel for our use is that it's only
twenty-two inches I would much prefer something like this twenty-six inch or
back here but that's not part of our experiment we have to stick within our
budget we can't add new barrels so we have something that's not going to get
quite as much muzzle velocity and it's going to heat up a lot but I still think
that we're gonna be in pretty good shape now for the question that's on
everyone's mind what is this chambered for well I'm not
gonna tell you this is kind of a controversy I'm really interested to see
what you guys think of the chamber that I saw now if it if your opinion deviates
from mind and your objectively wrong but if you'd like to see what I've chosen go
to the social progressive on Facebook like us and you can see some of the
behind the scenes stuff that's going on you can get a sneak peek at what chamber
I've selected for this rifle I've saved the worst for last this axis trigger is
one of the worst production triggers that you can possibly buy at the bottom
of my list of triggers there's the Mosin Nagant at the very bottom there's the
Bushmaster ba 50 which was just hideous you would think that a big expensive 50
caliber rifle would have a nice trigger nope but in third place there's this
when I first got that out of the box I could have sworn the safety was still on
that's how heavy this is I really think that this started pulling at eight
pounds eventually it broke in and it was only
pulling at six pounds but even with that that's a really heavy trigger and there
was a country mile of creep in this thing you would just pull and pull and
pull it just kind of grind and grind and then eventually it would just kind of go
off you had no idea when I was gonna do it now thankfully there are some great
fixes for this trigger first off if you got the axis to then congratulations you
have an active trigger but for those of us that got this base model axis there's
another really good aftermarket trigger called the rifle basics
and that thing is really nice I've gotten a chance to try one of those out
my father-in-law built a rifle that has one and it is a sweet sweet trigger now
I don't have the budget for that for this experiment I have to keep everything
within that $500 so what I'm going to do is I'm just gonna fix this trigger I'm
going to get rid of the creep I'm going to reduce the pull weight and I'm going
to add an over travel stop so that we end up with a good competition trigger
just using what came with the rifle for those of you that are familiar with the
axis trigger you can probably already see that I have made the upgrades this
trigger is already fixed this thing is amazing my father-in-law and I turned
this into a really nice trigger and you're gonna love what we did to this
it's really cheap to do - well I would have preferred the axis - but it's
better trigger I think that this base model savage axis will do just fine I
expect it to be plenty accurate and with a few modifications I think this will do
really really well the one thing that I wish that we could do on this budget and
I know that we can't would be to replace this barrel with something longer
heavier and maybe something match-grade maybe that's something for another
experiment but for now I think this will work just fine
you