Is Bergara B14R the Vudoo killer?

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Maple57

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Curious about what you guys think...

Is Bergara B14R the Vudoo killer?

I picked up a barreled action and put it in a MPA chassis. Took it for a spin for the first time on Saturday.

I was actually surprised how much I liked it.

Too preliminary for solid accuracy report, but I'm planning to change the barrel soon regardless.

But I was impressed with the 100 yard accuracy with SK Standard Plus ammo

It runs fine with Vudoo plastic mags which is cool. Planning to try the aluminum before long.

Anyway, balance is too far to the rear, and that's why I'm changing the barrel, but Vudoos are the same way.

I have yet to get out side by side with the Vudoo but that wont be far off either.

What is your experience?

Any reliability issues?
 
Maple57 said:
Curious about what you guys think...

Is Bergara B14R the Vudoo killer?


Anyway, balance is too far to the rear, and that's why I'm changing the barrel, but Vudoos are the same way.
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The Vudoo V22 is offered with an Ace barrel as long as 22" and a Shilen Ratchet up to 24".

It doesn't seem likely that the Bergara is a Vudoo killer. The custom barrels available on the latter would seem to militate against that.

If it was possible, would you replace the 18" factory Bergara B14R barrel with another, longer Bergara barrel with the same Bergara "match" chamber?
 
Maple57 said:
Curious about what you guys think...

Is Bergara B14R the Vudoo killer?

I picked up a barreled action and put it in a MPA chassis. Took it for a spin for the first time on Saturday.

I was actually surprised how much I liked it.

Too preliminary for solid accuracy report, but I'm planning to change the barrel soon regardless.

But I was impressed with the 100 yard accuracy with SK Standard Plus ammo

It runs fine with Vudoo plastic mags which is cool. Planning to try the aluminum before long.

Anyway, balance is too far to the rear, and that's why I'm changing the barrel, but Vudoos are the same way.

I have yet to get out side by side with the Vudoo but that wont be far off either.

What is your experience?

Any reliability issues?
Click to expand...

I'm happy with my B14R for the most part. A hefty bugger fer sure and it shoots tight with CCI SV well enough for my use. My only buggaboo's being that the loading/ejection port of the receiver be too short for easy single loading along with the lack of a flush fit, single shot mag adapter for the buggers. No worries on trigger options which is good. I put a Timney Calvin Elite 8 oz. on mine which made a big improvement over the issue trigger. The action is smooth and reliable with no issues regarding straight, flawless feeding of rounds into the chamber from the factory mag. Ejection of spent casings be sweet as well.

Seeing as Bergara worked closely with Shilen to get their rifling process up to snuff, along with excellent machining & build quality, I reckon that both the Bergara & Vudoo units are great shooters. It's always up to the ammo consistency though as we can't reload rimfire brass.
 
grauhanen said:
The Vudoo V22 is offered with an Ace barrel as long as 22" and a Shilen Ratchet up to 24".

It doesn't seem likely that the Bergara is a Vudoo killer. The custom barrels available on the latter would seem to militate against that.

If it was possible, would you replace the 18" factory Bergara B14R barrel with another, longer Bergara barrel with the same Bergara "match" chamber?
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Well, so far I have put out some pretty good groups at 100 yards with the Bergara. .75 MOA is nothing to sneeze at.

I still plan to replace the barrel soon, but not as much for accuracy as for balance, but even after that expense, the package will still be less expensive than a Vudoo and at that point, there is no meaningful performance difference between the two. But all in close to half the price.

Many rifles are favored as project guns that are decent out of the box, but can be made into something quite good. I see the Bergara B14R as such a rifle.
 
Many folks will buy the Vudoo purely because it's prohibitively expensive. This is regardless of what it offers in the accuracy department. Human nature is a funny thing. I'm pretty sure among shooters Bergara will sell very well indeed, but I don't see it affecting Vudoo sales.
 
Maple57 said:
Well, so far I have put out some pretty good groups at 100 yards with the Bergara. .75 MOA is nothing to sneeze at.

I still plan to replace the barrel soon, but not as much for accuracy as for balance, but even after that expense, the package will still be less expensive than a Vudoo and at that point, there is no meaningful performance difference between the two. But all in close to half the price.

Many rifles are favored as project guns that are decent out of the box, but can be made into something quite good. I see the Bergara B14R as such a rifle.
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Please post results of what barrel you plan on using please I’m very happy with mine but if there is another edge that could be interesting.
 
I have the v22. The action is like other custom actions. Machined precisely. Very nice to look at and work the bolt on. I’m sure the Bergera is very nice tho especially when you can’t afford such a ridiculously priced rig. I’d personally be happy with the Bergera. I still have my cz 452 I bought like 10 years ago as my first nice rimfire and still enjoy it
 
enefgee said:
I'm convinced that's why Christensen is still in business.
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Maybe but Christensen does offer products at different price points, while I don't own one I think they were also relatively early in the sub MOA and now the sub half MOA promise.

With Respect To Vudoo I don't think it is as simple as price. While there has always been some , they have managed to get a portion of the North American market thinking about rimfire in a different way. The notion of getting people to think of it like other custom actions was pretty smart. It was also a great time to introduce the product with the popularity of PRS/NRL and now the rimfire spinoffs.

Now it is obviously a petty darn nice product, time will tell.
 
I've only put about 400 rds through my steel barrel B-14 R. Seems to like CCI SV, SK Std+ and SK Rifle Match, but I'm still testing. I like the action and it is smoothing up nicely. TriggerTech Diamond helps as well.

K5YZk88.jpg


I have a friend with a Vudoo and another with a RimX with a Benchmark barrel. They have more precise rifles than mine out of the box. Preliminary testing shows my friend's RimX shoots the same ammo lot with better SDs, but sample sizes are different and could be skewing results.

The Bergara will probably settle in once I wear the burrs off the throat. Took a look with my borescope and looks like they used a dull chamber reamer.

Maple57, what barrel are you thinking of running?
 
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Johnny Boom, can you give a few details on your muzzle device?

With regard to the wearing out of imperfections in the leade area to which you refer, they're not uncommon in mass produced factory barrels such as on the Bergara. CZ bores are no stranger to these. Custom barrels should never have such imperfections although they do on rare occasions escape notice before leaving the manufacturer.
 
grauhanen said:
The Vudoo V22 is offered with an Ace barrel as long as 22" and a Shilen Ratchet up to 24".

It doesn't seem likely that the Bergara is a Vudoo killer. The custom barrels available on the latter would seem to militate against that.

If it was possible, would you replace the 18" factory Bergara B14R barrel with another, longer Bergara barrel with the same Bergara "match" chamber?
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Why does barrel length matter? I thought the sweet spot for a 22 was 16-18"? Anything longer and you lose velocity, and barrel length doesn't increase accuracy (unless you're talking iron sights, but then it's the sight radius not the barrel length that is really effecting accuracy?)
 
Suther said:
Why does barrel length matter? I thought the sweet spot for a 22 was 16-18"? Anything longer and you lose velocity, and barrel length doesn't increase accuracy (unless you're talking iron sights, but then it's the sight radius not the barrel length that is really effecting accuracy?)
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In my reply to the OP I didn't say that barrel length mattered. He had said of the Bergara that the "balance is too far to the rear, and that's why I'm changing the barrel, but Vudoos are the same way." I was noting that those longer barrels were available with the Vudoo and so they need not be balanced "the same way" as the Bergara.

As far as a "sweet spot" is concerned, if the goal is higher velocity as opposed to greatest accuracy then a shorter barrel may be desirable, if one accepts the general idea that a shorter barrel does in fact yield a significant difference in muzzle velocity. The difficulty of making barrel length and ammo MV assessments are not as easy as might appear. The same guy who produced the well-known ".22LR Rimfire Ammo Comparison Test" (seen here h t t p s://www.accurateshooter.com/guns-of-week/22lr-rimfire-ammo-comparison-test/) did an experiment in 2018 which he progressively reduced the length of a barrel inch by inch and chronied a variety of ammo. His conclusion was "With center fire each inch means something, here [with .22LR] not so much." See h t t p://forums.accuratereloading.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/8711043/m/4871072832/p/1

In any event, according to Vudoo video 4 of 11, barrels from 16.5 to 21" in length produce velocities similar to those published by the ammo makers and are sometimes printed on the ammo boxes themselves (around 2:15 to 2:45 here h t t p s://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyz3govTtMA ). If that applies across the majority of rifle barrels, then there's no reason to limit a barrel to 18" if the goal is having the highest MV's with .22LR ammo.

By how much .22LR barrels longer than 21" reduce MV is not clear. What is clear, however is that in .22Lr faster bullets drift more in the wind than slower ones.* This may be relevant to those shooting at longer distances under conditions when it is windy. Of course, with .22LR wind drift and drop resulting from gravity will be great no matter the MV of the ammo.

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*For anyone reading who is wondering about this, to use Center X ammo as an example, in a 10 mph cross wind, which is categorized as a "light breeze" on the Beaufort Scale, a bullet with a MV that's 100 fps slower than the published MV , will drift about 1.6" less at 200, about 2.7" less at 300, and about 3.7" less. To put it another way, according to the 1991 McCoy study of the aerodynamics characteristics of .22LR match ammo, a bullet that has a MV of 950 fps is 20% less sensitive to the wind than a bullet at 1090 fps.
 
I’m just curious. If your gun is shooting around 3/4 at 100 with a mid to low grade ammo, would it not make more sense to weight the mpa chassis?. Accuracy gains from a new barrel would be so negligible would it be worth the 700$+ smith fees.
Mine was capable of 1 inch 20 round groups at 100 and I would have never changed that barrel.
I didn’t think they were compatible with vudoo mags but your does, congrats I see the Bergara mag as the weak link in the Bergara set up
 
grauhanen said:
Thanks. In terms of details, what is the tuner's weight? Does it have an adjustment scale? What is the adjustment range? Does it have movements that are fixed by a detent ball or something similar? How do these compare to traditional rimfire barrel tuners?
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The current production weight of the Tuna Can is right around 1 lb, so it helps with the balance on these short little rifles. I have an internal weight kit in the MPA, with a spigot. It's balancing OK, but I like my usual centrefire setup with a 26" heavy Palma.

It's got markings from 0-9 on it, but a few guys are finding that nodes can be halfway between increments. There's a set screw to snug up when you find your final setting, but it's very well made and there is a decent amount of friction and no slop. I'm not an expert on rimfire tuners by any means, but in my limited experience, there's no rubber mass to it and the most obvious difference is that it is a thread-on as opposed to clamp-on. I'd say the adjustment range is about 1/2" just eyeballing it. Usually, a node is found within 1-2 rotations and it repeats on subsequent rotations.

The video cited previously is pretty good.


Yanick has been doing a lot of testing and he keeps good records. I'm just testing different lots of match ammo right now so I haven't gotten around to doing any meaningful tuning with the new Tuna Can yet. It won't turn crap ammo into Tenex but it will tighten groups, based on my previous experiences with the prototype fitted to my CZ 455 and what a bunch of PRS/CRPS shooters are seeing.

@grauhanen, speaking of barrel length, what's your opinion about SDs being better in longer rimfire barrels? There may be no real velocity gain, but some are saying that the SDs are lower, everything else being equal.

About the burrs, yes I've heard this can be an issues with the CZs as well. I've also heard this is the basis of some rifles shooting better after a certain amount of rounds. I think that maybe I was happier in my innocence, before I owned a borescope.;)
 
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JB, thanks for the tuner details.

Regarding ES and SD and barrel length, there isn't yet enough conclusive evidence to confirm whether a longer barrel does in fact contribute to a lower ES and SD. While some make this claim, which I had assumed was well-established, the fact remains that there is little serious statistical analysis that's been done that supports it.

A very serious and well-respected fellow who posts on many forums under the name HuskerP7M8 (or Landy) is one of the few shooters to have a ballistics tunnel of his own and the understanding of rifles, ammo, and statistics to make informed assessments. He has studied the question in the past. Here's his explanation of the relationship between barrel length and SD.

HuskerP7M8 said:
Peak pressure occurs when the bullet is barely out of the case and from approximately 6" on, friction in the barrel is increasingly the dominant force on the bullet. At approximately 16" to 18", velocity starts decreasing due to friction.

From a physics standpoint, friction robs the bullet of a given amount of energy per unit length traveled down the barrel. Because the energy of the bullet goes as the velocity squared, slower bullets will slow down quicker than faster bullets and this leads to an increased velocity standard deviation in longer barrels.

The testing I've done in my ballistic tunnel using barrels from 6" to 26" in length with nearly 2000 rds of ammo, indicates the sweet spot for minimum velocity standard deviation and velocity ES is in the 8" to 10" range.

This testing was done many years ago, but I may be revisiting it in the near future because I currently have a Shilen Octagon barrel that I believe I've shot out after some 25,000 to 30,000 rds. It'll be the perfect candidate for shooting 100 rd samples for every inch I cut off down to 8" or less.
There goes another 2000+ rds and a week of work just to satisfy my curiosity! LOL

With "TRUE" match ammo (Eley Match/10X, Midas+, R-50) having velocity SD's on average of 6fps to 8fps and shot at 50 yds/meters, an increase in precision has a weak statistical correlation. However, I suspect precision at 100 yds/meters and beyond should provide for a much stronger correlation to precision.

Landy
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See this thread on RFC, post #4 h t t p s://www.rimfirecentral.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1209803
See also post #131 here h t t p s://www.rimfirecentral.com/forums/showthread.php?p=11171981

Should he revisit the question it will be interesting to see if the evidence he gathers supports what he said above.
 
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