First off let me say I am no expert bench shooter by any means. Although I have hunted for 13 years now and have shot a lot of guns at a lot of targets. I am just trying to get into this long range and precision sport now. I decided not to tamper with any of my current hunting set ups, and buy a new rifle I could build on. So I started with a Savage 10FCP-SR in 308. Here is the rifle, stock as it comes, I just added some glass of course.
Don't mind the mess, I'm a home builder so my garage is full of quadruplets of every tool invented. Its pretty full. I figured I would just take a pic while cleaning the rifle in garage.
So first off some cons.
Nothing to do with the rifle, but Caldwell bipods... absolute piece of crap. Broke on me today! a nut came lose and the spring came out of one of the legs and it is a real pain in the ass to fix. Either way its being tossed today and will be replaced with a better product.
Back to the rifle. One thing I must say I really really don't like with this rifle. Is the magazine. Now I don't know who to blame here. Either the magazine does not feed correctly or the bolt is not catching/sliding correctly? This is my first savage, all my hunting rigs are Tikka, Sako and Browning. The sako and tikka have a action that is absolute perfection. So perhaps I am just used to those, but the savage does not have nearly the same feel. I feel like I am really grinding the gears when I am cycling. It seems to open and eject nicely, but does not chamber the next round smoothly at all. Sometimes it even jumped over the round and didn't even chamber a round. I found this very annoying. After coming home I cleaned her up nicely and greased the action quite a bit. It feels smoother now, but still not like my sakos.
This was just about all I can say bad about this rifle. Normally a rough action would make me run away from any rifle. And if it didn't do what I show you next, believe me it would have been on the EE tonight. Smooth action is extremely important to me.
So here are the pros
ACCURACY!!! wow!!!
I had a terrible time sighting it in. I was alone on the bench at first so I had no one to watch the flight path. I mounted the scope without bore sighting so I figured first few shots would be fun. Once I got it on paper at 50 yards. I went down to the 200 as I want my zero to be 200 yards. I really had no intent to create a 5 group target. Although on my sighting target the shots were so consistent I had to set up a new target to try.
Now again I am no precision veteran. I don't even reload as of yet. I was shooting Remington Premier Tips with the 165 grain Accubonds. I was shooting from a bench using a bipod only, no back rest. Now I know a lot of guys could do much better than I did but again I am trying show off the out of box accuracy of this rifle.
Here it is.
Top left 1.700
Top right 1.192
Center 1.192
Bottom left 1.402
Bottom right 1.646
Average 1.427
Another thing that was nice about this fluted heavy barrel was that it remained cool through the entire shoot. I have some other varmint barrels that are usually pretty hot to the touch by the third or fourth round. Today was about 9 Celsius and I fired off 40 rounds. In those 40 I took a few minute breaks in between the 5 shot groups. The barrel wasn't even hot after the 5 shot groups which I shot in roughly 2 minutes. Good quality barrel for sure.
So all in all for a rifle in the less than $1500 class, its a great shooter out of the box. Now I am zeroed in at 200, I'll be taking it to a buddies farm this weekend to get it out to 500 yards. Now lets see if I got myself in over my head.
Thanks for reading
Don't mind the mess, I'm a home builder so my garage is full of quadruplets of every tool invented. Its pretty full. I figured I would just take a pic while cleaning the rifle in garage.
So first off some cons.
Nothing to do with the rifle, but Caldwell bipods... absolute piece of crap. Broke on me today! a nut came lose and the spring came out of one of the legs and it is a real pain in the ass to fix. Either way its being tossed today and will be replaced with a better product.
Back to the rifle. One thing I must say I really really don't like with this rifle. Is the magazine. Now I don't know who to blame here. Either the magazine does not feed correctly or the bolt is not catching/sliding correctly? This is my first savage, all my hunting rigs are Tikka, Sako and Browning. The sako and tikka have a action that is absolute perfection. So perhaps I am just used to those, but the savage does not have nearly the same feel. I feel like I am really grinding the gears when I am cycling. It seems to open and eject nicely, but does not chamber the next round smoothly at all. Sometimes it even jumped over the round and didn't even chamber a round. I found this very annoying. After coming home I cleaned her up nicely and greased the action quite a bit. It feels smoother now, but still not like my sakos.
This was just about all I can say bad about this rifle. Normally a rough action would make me run away from any rifle. And if it didn't do what I show you next, believe me it would have been on the EE tonight. Smooth action is extremely important to me.
So here are the pros
ACCURACY!!! wow!!!
I had a terrible time sighting it in. I was alone on the bench at first so I had no one to watch the flight path. I mounted the scope without bore sighting so I figured first few shots would be fun. Once I got it on paper at 50 yards. I went down to the 200 as I want my zero to be 200 yards. I really had no intent to create a 5 group target. Although on my sighting target the shots were so consistent I had to set up a new target to try.
Now again I am no precision veteran. I don't even reload as of yet. I was shooting Remington Premier Tips with the 165 grain Accubonds. I was shooting from a bench using a bipod only, no back rest. Now I know a lot of guys could do much better than I did but again I am trying show off the out of box accuracy of this rifle.
Here it is.
Top left 1.700
Top right 1.192
Center 1.192
Bottom left 1.402
Bottom right 1.646
Average 1.427
Another thing that was nice about this fluted heavy barrel was that it remained cool through the entire shoot. I have some other varmint barrels that are usually pretty hot to the touch by the third or fourth round. Today was about 9 Celsius and I fired off 40 rounds. In those 40 I took a few minute breaks in between the 5 shot groups. The barrel wasn't even hot after the 5 shot groups which I shot in roughly 2 minutes. Good quality barrel for sure.
So all in all for a rifle in the less than $1500 class, its a great shooter out of the box. Now I am zeroed in at 200, I'll be taking it to a buddies farm this weekend to get it out to 500 yards. Now lets see if I got myself in over my head.
Thanks for reading
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