I recently acquired a Ruger #1 heavy barrel Special Varminter in 25-06. The guy gave me about 30rds of handloads and all of them are running about a 3" vertical group in a straight line. I dug through all of my Varmint Hunter mags because I seem to remember an article on this very subject. Anyone that has the cure please let me know.

I had a #1V .25-06; it shot pretty well once I got the trigger stoned, and learned where to rest the front of the rifle.



#1s are very sensitive to fore-arm pressure. Try adjusting the screw in the fore-arm a bit to try to find the point at which groups seem to 'settle down', before getting into the fore-arm hanger modifications.



George

A quick remedy is to force a brass shim between the fore end hanger and the barrel. I believe I formed mine from a piece of an old dog tag. There is also the option of drilling and tapping the fore end hanger for an Allen head set screw to vary pressure on the barrel. I believe a kit is offered by some U.S. manufacturer which includes a bearing seat to go between the screw and barrel.

Having to play with how you hold or support the rifle to get good results means that the rifle is too fussy to leave as is. My 22-250 went from 10" vertical strings for 5 shots to a straight 5/8" group shooter with the addition of the shim and a bit of glass work in the forend - and it didn't matter a bit where the forend rested on the sandbag after that was done.

I also would suspect forearm bedding to be the problem. My #1B stainless in 7mmSTW gave unacceptable accuracy when new. I had to hog out the barrel channel to fully float the barrel. This rifle will now shoot several loads into 1 inch or less at 100 yd

Perf,

All good advice but if the quality of the reloads is suspect I suggest before you tweak the rifle buy a box of quality ammo, or load some yourself. The stringing may be 100% from velocity spread due to a number of ammo factors, poor powder charge weight uniformity being the most common.

stevey: Good point on consistency of reloads but if his behaved as mine used to each successive shot printed 2 1/2" inches higher than the previous one. There was no up and down alternately-just up. I concluded that the warming barrel was increasing forend tip pressure and consequently increasing the stress on the hanger. Basically causing a spring board effect. Whatever, but firming the contact between the barrel and hanger and bedding the fore end to the hanger while floating the tip of the stock stopped the problem like Raid.

My #1 Hornet responded to floating the barrel and 5 thicknesses of shims cut from the side of a Coke can.
The point of impact still changes slightly when the resting point of the forend is varied. Maybe I'll tried some glass bedding in it. Pedro