straightshooter wrote:OMG
A factory chamber that is possibly off center or off axis......unthinkable!
In a Tikka......impossible!
Well don't you know they are made by (take a deep breath and genuflect) Sako.
The sad news is that mostly factory rifles are chambered very quickly with reamers in various states of wear and clearances and the precision of the chambering will generally conform to a Pareto distribution that can be broken down to 10% very good, 80% average, 10% not good.
The comforting news is that a slightly dodgy chamber is not the sole determinant of accuracy.
By the way, when sample rifles are sent to reviewers for them to gush with praise, which end of the Pareto distribution do you think they are chosen from?
Now stop and think about why you pay many hundreds of dollars for a precision gunsmith (not a recycled blacksmith) to do a chambering job. It's not because he whacks the barrel in a machine and drills out the chamber in a matter of minutes or possibly seconds as the factories do. Everything is done carefully and slowly in as precise setup as is possible and may take a number of hours.
Thanks straightshooter..
I detect you have some issues surrounding folk who seem to think that because Tikka's are made in the Sako factory, that they will be perfect...?
Were they mean to you on the Tikka forum...?
(i suggest you see Bretts little footnote on each of his posts
)
Well im not one of those guys
...& Ive not suggested that being a Tikka, & thus made by Sako, that it should mean the chamber & rifling should be perfect...in fact, i had a new Sako once that was so bad, i had a fight with various folk about it & refused to shoot it & i sent it back...!!
Here is
some of what was wrong with it--
*it wouldn't sit in the barrel channel properly-every time you set it even in the stock it would find its way back to touching, or at least nearly touching the for end on one side, & that was from tinkering with a wide variety of screw torque settings, so you can imagine how much it would move when shot...!??!
*the chamber was so bad it literally had chunks ripped off the lands/start of the rifling,
*the barrel steel was so bad it looked like the moon in some areas with all the pitting & had a giant crater (pit) right on the inside edge of the crown that was already full of copper from factory firing,
you needed two hands with considerable force to push the mag in to allow for its release, not to mention the mag & bolt was scratched...
...AND...the inletting was so bad around the tang that i could have retired on the funds from renting the space out to a boat full of illegal immigrants....
So im well aware of the pitfalls of mass production...not to mention that in my post, i didn't elude to the fact that it shouldn't have any problems because its a Tikka.
Having seen in a few new chambers now, im well aware of what can be expected, & i looked into this one before it was shot & i dont recall it to be all that bad--certainly not polished silk, but not bad compared to whats out there.
The only reason this has come about is because ive never measured the lands in a rifle using a permanent marker on the bullet, & the marks the rifling left had posed some obvious thought processes & thus questions to someone who has basically just been a keen as mustard rabbit shooter for his entire life, & is now driven by just simply wanting to get better at this whole shooting thingo.
Its plainly obvious that there is not a great deal i can do about it, but it cant hurt for me to ask.
The man who knows everything, doesnt really know everything...he's just stopped learning...