I have an older Remington 700 in 6mm that has refused to shoot well since the local "gunsmith" "free floated" the barrel for me. I think that the channel in the stock was off center originally and Remington fitted it nicely to compensate for the flaw. With the tinkering the flaw has turned into a royal PITA.
The action shifts side to side in the stock and the barrel is either floated or resting against one side of the stock.
I've been getting split groups with everything I've tried.
A fellow in the area told be to try putting a few pieces of notebook paper with holes punched through to raise the action and barrel out of the skewed channel. That did not do much good either.
I finally bought an Acraglass kit and am waiting for it to warm up a bit so I can bed it. It will be the first time I've tried this so I've been reading as many DIY accounts as possible.
What I want to know is should I glass bed and then maybe pillar bed later or just pillar bed to start?
Is pillar bedding going to make a huge difference in a factory gun with factory barrel?
Any advice would be great.

I'm a believer in glass bedding the action and free floating the barrel.....take it from there......

I know Remington intentionally installed a bump in the foreend to put upwards pressure on the barrel.....that can be restored if desired.......but I've never desired.

I prefer to do it in two stages when I have the time.....do the glass bedding with the barrel supported with glass at the chamber area and the barrel free floating....then when the glass has set up and the action is fitting properly .....I go back and install the metal pillars and let the new glass hold the action and barrel group in proper alignment as the pillars set up in their glass retainer.....I have seen some VERY good shooting factory barreled 700's for non competition level shooting with taylored precision handloads and a trigger job.......as for the glassing....DON'T FORGET THE RELEASE AGENT-TWO COATS EVERYWHERE.....and put a couple layers of tape on the recoil lug front and sides...NOT rear surface....and don't forget to release agent the holes and screws.....enjoy the process and good luck and good shooting!!!

I've bedded a slew of Remington 700s on my own with Accraglass Gel, and usually the results have been excellent. I prefer pillar bedding for good custom rifles, but I have never done that job myself.

Model 700s are fairly easy to bed, but by the same token, bedding jobs are also fairly easy to mess up. And I've seen gunsmiths mess 'em up as well.

The recoil lug should be in contact with the bedding surface on the REAR portion of the lug ONLY - not the front, sides, or bottom. If the lug is messed up, the rifle won't shoot well. I usually mask off the front, bottom, and sides of the lug with Brownell's 'Kleen Klay' instead of electrician's tape, simply because it's very easy for bedding material to work it's way under the tape. Not so with Kleen Klay.

I bed the receiver full length (remove the scope and magazine box first!), but I do not tighten the action screws. I use a dummy set of screws as a guide, and then wrap the receiver and receiver portion of the stock with surgical tubing. This eliminates uneven pressure spots which unevenly torqued screws can introduce. This 'stress-free' bedding concept is bedrock in its importance.

After the receiver is bedded, I bed underneath the triggerguard assembly as well, again, in order to achieve a uniform, stress-free bedding platform. It is critical that the screws do not touch the screw holes, and I usually redrill the stock's screw holes to slightly oversize after bedding in order to remove any bedding material that might have gotten inside, and to remove any latent tight spots in the wood itself. Likewise, the magazine box must not bind in the magazine box mortice of the stock.

I usually shoot the rifle with the barrel completely free-floated at first, but if accuracy is whimsical, I bed the first two to four inches of the barrel shank (starting just ahead of the recoil lug, which, again, must not touch the bedding). Often, this additional bedding works wonders to improve accuracy. Very rarely, I'v added bedding just back of the forend tip as well, but this is usually not necessary.

Rifles are like a tuning fork: Small variations have a major inpact on the results you achieve.

AD

A friend asked me to free-float a Model Seven Rem in 7-08. I did. It had been shooting for him about 1.5" groups. Free-floated it was shooting 3" groups on a good day and usually bigger than that. I bedded the action and left his barrel free-floated. Same song, different verse. Put a bit of pressure on the forend, 12 lbs as I recall, and it consistently started shooting .6" groups. You might have exactly the same problem.

Bed the action first. Then shoot it. If it doesn't shoot, try the match books or business cards on the forend until it does shoot.

MLC,

You said you have read plenty on bedding so I will assume you have the basics as good as they can be, based on reading.

As Allen said stress is the thing to be avoided. I use screws with the heads ground down and the screws are in the action when I put the barreled action into the stock. I wrap a couple of turns of masking tape around the screws because sometimes the screws might no longer be perfectly round from buffing cured epoxy off them and with release agent only on the screws that can make them very hard to screw out. No problem when there are a couple of turns of masking tape on them.

I line the front of the barrel up with tape around the barrel and right at the forend tip. Once I am happy everything is how it should be I drop the barreled action into the stock and bed just behind the tape on the barrel. For this I use a real quick setting poly steyrene type filler....car body filler type of stuff. I only have this little bedding pad stick to the bottom of the barrel chanel by using vaseline or similar on the wood for maybe 3/8th" down from the edge of the wood. After 10 or 20 minutes I pull the barreled action out and then remove the tape from the barrel. The main reason I do this is that sometimes the barrel will creep a little bit when tape of card is used to support the barrel while the epoxy is curing. Quite often the barrel will pinch the tape or card between the sides rather than resting on the bottom. The other reason I do this is because once it is completed I can put everything to one side and bed the rifle the next day. I use to bed and test fire a lot of rifles and I would do a batch like this but I still do the same for one rifle.

I do not bed between the tang and receiver. In fact I have the action floating between those two points. On a Remington 700 or Win M70 I only bed the tang and front receiver ring....I have no bedding under the first inch or so of barrel.

Apart from free floating the action between the tang and receiver ring I differ to the other posters in that I bed all around the recoil lug. One day I might not get one apart if tapers are going the wrong way My own testing shows this to be superior to bedding only the rear of the recoil lug.

If the rifle is a light barrel gun then I leave the scope on and that adds a little weight. If there is no scope then I stick a steel rod through the rings.

After I have pulled the rifle apart I then put a polish on all the edges of the recoil lug so as to prevent any bedding compound being shaved off when the rifle is assembled.

For release agent I use either the Devcon spray on mould release or one we get locally in Australia from Ciba Geighy. These are sprayed on then wiped off the areas where the bedding will touch the action. What you are left with with almost looks like a finger print.

I rub vaseline or similar on the wood where the floor plate goes and also inside the magazine well and also on the area of wood in front of the tang.

For me, if the rifle will not shoot this way and of course assuming scope/ammo etc. is OK, then a new barrel as I have no interest in trying to make a rifle shoot with pressure points and so on.

Having said all of that, if you simply bed between tang and receiver while sticking a card or tape to both position the barrel and also lift it out for free floating and cover the action on floor wx the odds are very high the rifle will shoot well if the barrel is OK.

On Rem 700s with the laminated stocks I often "pillar" bed them as the small floorplate area of the Rem 700 will often crush those stock and once it starts it keeps going and gives the impression that the front screws is getting loose. However I do not have the action resting on the pillar. I simply have some cylinders made up and which I glue into the stock for the floor plate to rest on and of course this is the same as making the area of the floor plate larger.

Mike

Get stock makers pins from Brownells they are about three bucks. Get Allen head screws for your gun (You are gonna mess up the old ones and the allen heads work better). If you have a drill press spend $11.00 and get a Holland Pillar kit.

Drill the stock to fit the pillars.

Take off the trigger assembly scope rings and bases (you are gonna re-site anyway).

Screw the pillars tight with the old screws make sure they are centered.

Drop it in the stock and get everything square a little sanding or oblonging the holes with a file.

Once it it square take the pillars off.

Spray the action with relaese agent or Johnson's paste wax, screws and a q-tip inside the pillars. Install the pillars and cover the screw heads with play-doe or modeling clay.

Put some epoxy on the pillars and drop the gun in the stock and tie it down. Make sure it stays square. Let it cure.

Pop (take out the screws) it out install your stock pins. Ruff out the inside of the stock. Duct tape the out side( the whole stock). I cover the stock and cut out the in letting with a razor blade. Put 5 layers of masking tape about 3 inches in front of the recoil lug on the barrel. I put three wraps of duct tape around the recoil lug and cut away the front with a razor. Mix up about twice as much epoxy as you think you need. Put a layer of masking tape over the trigger slot and cut it so only a few thousands are holding it in place do the same with the magazine hole. Use a 10cc syringe (feed store $1.00 each get about 5) put the epoxy in with the syringe and butter it out with a popcicle stick. Put the action in and wait about 1 hour. Clean up anything that ran over on to the stock with alcohol. Let it set about 12-16 hours and pull the action. Clean up the run off, it will still be soft enough to cut with a razor. clean out any voids remove the masking tape from the trigger and mag holes. Then re-do with a thin coat. After you are done, mix some more thinned with Mineral spirits and do the barrel channel with the tape in place. it will seal the channel. Prep is the key use plenty of release agent between steps. Pillar bedding is waaay easier than a full action bed. Do both while you are at it. This with good handloads has cut all my 700s groups by half. You will be bedding everything once you are done. I am sure you will get lots of tips and tricks. You will get better with practice. Stress free and action support is what you are looking for, it don't have to be pretty.