anyone know of a gun smith who works on Ruger 77's?

I have my pop's old .270 that I can hit a pie plate with at 100 yards, but want it to do better...I have reservations on doing anything with it, given it's history but I'd like to look into it.

Thanks

Dave

Dave

Back in the 70's and 80's I had a lot of 77 Rugers come through my shop with serious accuracy problems. They seldom responded to the normal modifications for improvement, glass bedding, recrowning, trigger tuning, float barrel, pressure bed barrel, etc. The only thing that cured them was to rebarrel with a quality barrel. The factory barrels were for the most part very poorly made.

It is commonly known that during that period Ruger was outsourcing their barrels and at one point were paying $11.00 for them. Ed Shilen once told me that Ruger purposely had them manufactured with the bores .001 over size to give them a safety margin for overloads and added protection from law suits. I have read that Ruger has never lost a law suit nor paid one nickel out in damages.

Bottom line is bite the bullet and have it rebarreled by a competant gunsmith. You can not ecconomicaly justify it but you will forget about the cost after shooting it.

Try malm that posts on here. He is a fulltime, all-around, smith and has tons of experience on just about every brand out there. He’s in Utah.

quote:

Originally posted by Craftsman:
Dave

Back in the 70's and 80's I had a lot of 77 Rugers come through my shop with serious accuracy problems. They seldom responded to the normal modifications for improvement, glass bedding, recrowning, trigger tuning, float barrel, pressure bed barrel, etc. The only thing that cured them was to rebarrel with a quality barrel. The factory barrels were for the most part very poorly made.


Bottom line is bite the bullet and have it rebarreled by a competant gunsmith. You can not ecconomicaly justify it but you will forget about the cost after shooting it.

I really did not want to know this! I have two Ruger 77s "Made in the 200th Year of American Liberty" (1976). The .257 Roberts just does NOT want to shoot and the .243 (bull barrel) is little better. And I really do not want to rebarrel either of them.

Then I recently bought another 77 (made in 1973) in 7 x 57 Mauser that I haven't tried yet. At least the Mauser can be rebarreled without a lot of anguish on my part.

While I have certainly seen my share of unruly Rugers, I can't in all honesty say that I've seen a whole lot that didn't benefit to one degree or another from a little careful tweaking. It's like anything else that is mass produced, there are those that are not quite as bad as others. Before I would feel comfortable ruling anything out, I would want to put my eyes on the actual gun in question.

I have had 3 "old" 77's - the worst of which printed 1.25" groups after a little work. The first one I bought, a .270 from a buddy's neighbor, looked a little rough, but for $200, I figured it would be a relatively cheap project. It shot about a 2.5" group when I bought it. About $18 and a little work later (floated, bedded, & trigger worked - all by yours truly), it consistently shoots under 1". Kinda irritated me, since I bought it to re-barrel, but now I can't bring myself to do it - shoots too good.

I did not mean to give you guys the idea I thought all of the old 77 Rugers had bad barrels. Just a large percentage of them when compared to other brands.

Not keeping records that far back it's hard to say but my estimate would be one out of three would respond to normal accuracy tweaking but that leaves about two out of three that would not.

Still I agree with Malm and Tx, that I would certainly try to tune the rifle to shoot before rebarreling.

I have owned at least 3 tang safty rugers. I really can only remember shooting 2 of them much.
1 was a 300 win I would love to have back, cause it was a shooter.
The other was a like new .308 that I had mabye a year and a half ago, after trying about 10 loads through it, and not getting better than about 3"s at 100, I traded it for a 45/70 marlin that at 100 yards shoots just a shade over MOA...tj3006