I have a Weatherby Mark V Deluxe in .257 Weatherby that I can't seem to get to shoot worth a hoot. The consistency is crap. A few weeks ago I shot a group with 110 grain Accubonds and RL25 that breathed new life into me, only to be dashed by further attempts. However, I refuse to believe it is not a good load, I just need to find out what is wrong with the gun...it hasn't shot anything worth a crap since I got serious. I have tried 100 grain TSX's and Partitions, 110 grain Accubonds, 115 grain Ballistic tips and IMR 7828, RL22, IMR 4831 and RL25.

Saturday I went out and it was cold, rainy and humid. My point of impact with the aforementioned load shifted 6 inches to the right.

Got me thinking...I'm going to free float this s.o.b.!!!!!!!!!

Is this a good idea? What about doing it without glassing anything? Still a good idea?

I need help before I go crazy with this thing.

Thanks.

Just a Thought on your issues:

First; Free floating the barrel will help but not as doing the following.

I would Bed the rifle and insure that the wood is sealed, the fact that you are having shifts that occur with heat, humidity, and weather makes me suspect the wood is not sealed... See if that helps. For a real shooter I would Pillar bed the rifle to minimize the possiblity of tweaking the action or other metal.

I suspect that if you fix the Bedding and barrel presure issues, you will have a real tack driver.

If I was going to put the effort into free floating the barrel I would do the job right and Bed it and seal the wood at the same time.

Look at it this way.....what can it hurt?....

Go for it and float the barrel. If you still want to glass bed it you can still do it.

Personally, I'd do both immediately but you can hurt nothing by trying!

This is my experiance.. I found and bought a M70 SS Classic synthetic 338 Win mag in early July.. shot okay.. not spectacular.. I remember what the Finns did with their M39s and some of the earlier M28s and 28-30s.. they used a metal shim under the action front and back, to float the barrel.. I made a couple of shims out of .020 sheet copper.. front and back, drilled them for guard screws to hold their position... groups instantly shrank to under one inch at 100 yds.. used this rifle to kill my first Dall ram in Alaska 9-10-06.. HTH.. Les

quote:

Originally posted by 300winnie:
I have a Weatherby Mark V Deluxe in .257 Weatherby ... A few weeks ago I shot a group with 110 grain Accubonds and RL25 that breathed new life into me, only to be dashed by further attempts.

Hey 300winnie, The 257WbyMags are great Cartridges "once" you get them sorted out.

quote:

...I have tried 100 grain TSX's and Partitions, 110 grain Accubonds, 115 grain Ballistic tips and IMR 7828, RL22, IMR 4831 and RL25.

They can indeed be tricky to get going. I'd agree you are doing the correct thing by trying various combinations of components. There does not seem to be a "best" all around Powder that works well in all of them.

You might want to try some H1000 or some H870(if you can still find any).

quote:

Saturday I went out and it was cold, rainy and humid. My point of impact with the aforementioned load shifted 6 inches to the right.

Are you saying this rifle has a "warping" Termite Food Stock? Plenty of folks(not me) on this site "claim" Termite Food Stocks NEVER warp.

quote:

...I'm going to free float ...Is this a good idea?

Maybe, only way to know is to try it. But, it might be worse than ever. Many of the thin barrel rifles I have seem to work fine with a bit of Fore End Pressure.

quote:

What about doing it without glassing anything? Still a good idea?

Another - maybe! Just depends on how well the action fits in the stock. Since you are having what appears to be "warping" though, I'd guess that could be 90% of the problem.

How many shots are you taking before letting the barrel completely cool?

quote:

I need help before I go crazy with this thing...

Once you get it going properly, it has the potential to become one of your favorite rifles - due to all the effort going into it.

I would bed the action and free float all at once. Another thing to do while working on it is to make sure you remove all the copper fouling.

I have had a lot better consistency with good wood properly finished than I have had with tupperware stocks. The average synthetic stock is worse than wood. Good synthetics are very good, but they are in the minority of synthetic stocked rifles. I would be very suprised if that little change in temp and moisture caused that kind of impact change. When factories realized they could increase margins by putting cheap plastic stocks on rifles, then gun rags started printing stories about how terrible wood is.

THis is kinda a touchy subject for some-how well do you usually shoot? Please don't be offended, but almost all of the "wood stock problems" I have ever seen were traced to the hands wrapped around the wood stock. It won't hurt anything to have a buddy of yours who consistantly shoots better than you shoot a few groups for you. My buddy was cursing a .22 rifle a couple of months ago and I sat down behind it and shot the best groups it had ever shot. He was blaming the wood stock and questioning the scope he just paid some one to mount for him. And I am not the best shot out there, that is for sure!!!

So-what type front and rear rests are you using? WHat kind of bench are you on? How many wind flags do you have, and what ranges are they positioned? How long are you letting the barrel cool down between groups?

Are all of your screws tight? Bases, rings, and action? Unscrew them - take everything off, and then put it back together with loctite.

How about the ammo? How many groups are you shooting with each load? Many people shoot 1 or 2 three shot groups and that is not enough to tell you anything about it. Statistcally it is pretty menaingless. Run several groups with each load down the barrel and see what it does with each. You say you refuse to believe it is not a good load, but there is NO load that is "good" in each and every rifle of a certain caliber!!! Scrap it and try other powder and bullet combos. How far are you jumping the bullets? How close can you get to the lands in this rifle?

How clean is the barrel? How many rounds do you pur through it before you get it back to bare metal? How are you cleaning to be sure you are back down to bare metal?

With a shift like you are talking about, if everything is tight and a person with proven ability expereinces the same problems, the very first thing I would do change scopes. I don't care if the one on the rifle is brand new out of the box, came of a known shooter, or anything. I would change scopes without changing anything else and see what happened.

If your buddy has the same problem and the rifle does the same thing with a different scope on it, and you have taken everything off and screwed back down and th eproblem is still there, then glass bed it and free float the barrel.

This is what I would do, in that order. I have never seen a wood stock move like you are talking about from so little water and temp change. If the gun rag writers had not regurgitated the same mantra "wood=bad, synthetic=good" over and over then I seriously doubt you would even be thinking it righ tnow. Wood will move, but not that fast. Synthetic moves faster due to temperature changes than wood does. Sheap saynthetics move A LOT faster than wood with temperature changes.

Please don't be offended by any of these suggestions. I promise they are all printed in an attempt to help you get to the bottom of things. This is why gunmakers hate to "gurantee" accuracy-there are too many vatiables beyond our control when the final product is in the customer's hands. Everything may be fine, but there is no way to know from this end.

And some rifles just won't shoot, period. A new barrel is the only answer.

I agree with what you say. Some plastic stocks do suck. I had a Remington 280 and the only way to fix the flexible forend was to cut the plastic out and steel bed a 3/8" diameter length of aircraft stainless tubing into it. Then it shot great. Of course I steel bedded the action and removed any offending plastic at the same time. But hand pressure would no longer move the fore end.
Scopes can be a big problem too.
However, I found that glassing the action and floating the barrel was always the best first step, then other problems could be narrowed down. Doing that to my .300 Weatherby changed it from a 2" rifle to a 1/2" rifle right away.

Thank you all for your suggestions and help. Here is what I have decided to do before I get into anything drastic.

Last night I started cleaning the barrel...going down to bare metal before I shoot again. Started with Butches Bore Shine to get the carbon out, and after brushing with a nylon brush and pushing that crud out I put another dose of BBS in and let it sit for a couple of hours. Patch was greenish/blue as expected, but not much in the way of gray or brown. Proceeded with Wipe Out. Let it sit overnight and pushed it out this morning. More blue sludge with some black as well (I assume this is powder fouling). Put a new dose in and it is sitting as I am here at work. Will continue with the wipeout until the patch is white.

I took the action out of the stock to look for any areas where the stock was wearing on the metal. Couldn't find any. I assume this means that I have a reasonable good fit between action and stock. Is this a reasonable assumption? I put the action and stock back together and made sure the screws were tight.

I loaded up some new rounds with H1000 and 110 grain Accubonds. I loaded them up in half grain increments from 71.0 to 73.5 grains. The load I had put together with the RL25 powder was pushing the Accubonds at just over 3,500 fps with 74.0 grains. I reviewed the burn rate charts, and all the information I could come up with on H1000 and it appears that it is just slightly faster in burn rate than RL25 so this is how I derived my max point for now.

In addition to loading those up, I took the loads I had with RL25 that were showing some promise and pushed the bullet in to the case to give me an overall length of 3.250" They had been set to the maximum length I could get them to function through the ejection port. Once I have fired the H1000 loads, I will try these to see if seating them to that point helps out.

I thought I would give this project one more go around before I go to the seriousness of bedding and floating this rifle.

I am going to attach the target that gave me hope. In addition, this load, in my experimentation with it, has had two rounds touching a high percentage of the time. The problem is it that the other shots in the string are sometimes two inches away. The group shown measured in the .7's at 100 yards.

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