About 43 years ago, Bob Forslund was showing me how a properly bedded rifle should behave. As I recall, this rifle was a 6x47, built on his own action. Anyway, He fired two shots which were touching. He removed the barreled action from the stock and replaced it. He fired another shot, which touched the first two. He took it apart again, reassembled and fired the last two shots. The group ended up just under .3
Bob's rifle was bedded stress free and he was skilled as a 'smith and a shooter. I expect my rifles to be able to be disassembled and reassembled without a significant POI change.
Bob and his twin brother Al were both good friends of mine. We did a lot of hunting/shooting/building match rifles together.
To show how serious they were about the different shooting venues, they both took a year off work to attend the PVI trade school and took the machinist course offered there. Then they set up a shop, with three phase power, so that they could run industrial size lathes, milling machines, broaching machines, belt sanders, grinders and more. All of their equipment was top of the line back in the day.
The rifle you're talking about was a shortened 6x47, more like a 6x45. They wanted something different, so went about the task of shortening a 6x47 reamer with a chip out of the shoulder, which they purchased from Noby Uno.
Al passed away in 2002 from a hereditary heart condition and Bob followed a few years later. They were absolutely inseparable. They bought property together, set up a company to clean up logging sites and fight forest fires, along with other things, They did well on all of them. If you didn't know what to look for, you couldn't tell them apart as they were identical twins.
They designed a single shot action that utilized Jewel triggers, Remington bolts and could easily and quickly change out the barrels on by matching up the mate marks on the base.
Back to that rifle or more like rifles. They only built four of them. One each for themselves and one each for their two sons that showed an interest in shooting.
I miss those days we spent in the field and in the shop. We made everything, from stocks to scope rings/bases, trigger guards, trigger shoes, along with just about every other accessory we could think up.
Al made a special rifle rest for the unlimited class HBR matches to eliminate as much human error as possible. It utilized a large steel ball in a matching recess and aim was adjusted moving the handle attached to the ball. The thing was heavy, to say the least. The rifle wasn't clamped as per the rules but that rest was pushing a lot of rules to their limit.
They were extremely anal about repeatability and consistency. They used Titanium Putty almost exclusively as a bedding compound and skim coated with Brownelle's Acraglas. When accuracy wasn't up to their expectations, they sanded the skim coat down and reapplied it so the action was tight in the bedding. The stocks they built were made from hollow McMillan blanks, which were first filled with foam, then either an aluminum block bed, which had been machined fit the receiver was epoxied in or they filled the area with Putty and pressed the receiver in to form the bedding. After that, they always installed pillars.
Al was working on a solid aluminum stock when he came down with Cancer and had a heart attack at the same time. He never did finish it and after Al passed, Bob's heart was no longer into the shooting game.
I tried to keep him interested by inviting him to some HBR matches and to accompany me on hunts. He decided to fish instead, on Arrow Lake, where he and All grew up on a farm just out of Edgewood.
To compare a bedding job done by either Al or Bob to a factory off the shelf rifle??????? To use their bedding job as an example of how good it should be is about as good as it gets.
