Re: savage vs FN pbr xp
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: AXEMAN</div><div class="ubbcode-body"> what does FN have out there for it? ive never looked, but </div></div>
You should have just stopped posting right there.
An FN PBR XP is a Winchester Model 70 action. It is one of the best bolt action rifle designs ever invented.
Picking a rifle design based on a bunch of aftermarket crap on the market?
C'mon, have some sense....
Everything you could possibly need for either rifle is available.
My experience, which I admit is very limited, with Savage is that they're designed to be cheap rifles. Stuff I've read on here suggests that they aren't as smooth as a Remington or Winchester action, and are in need of serious trigger work from the factory. They are obviously less expensive. They have a reputation for excellent accuracy out of the box, however. As such, they have a reputation for being excellent "value" rifles--offering a lot for less money.
The FN/Winchester action is going to be more expensive to rebarrel, because it requires a special machining operation to clearance the barrel for the extractor.
Neither are as common as the R700, with which more gunsmiths are familiar.
If I had a Savage, I'd probably resist putting any money into it unless I intended to keep it indefinitely. Everyone knows they're cheap rifles. Nobody's going to pay you what it's worth, with upgrades, even though there's no doubt that it costs just as much to build up a Savage as anything else.
I'm not sure I'd put a whole lot of money in a Winchester action unless I intended to keep it for a long time as well. Personally, I love mine, and I think it's in many ways a superior action to a R700. But the R700 has been around for almost 50 years and it won the popularity contest. People will pay more for a R700 in many cases even though it is in some ways inferior. This is just the way of the market, not a personal judgment call on my part.
Many people on this site who wish to build custom rifles end up buying a custom action, I think for a good reason. By the time you pay someone to true up your action and install a custom barrel, you're going to be very close to the price of a custom action anyway, which may offer some features you like.
I don't think there's any better factory action than the FN/Win70 and if I were going to build a custom rifle based on a factory action, I wouldn't build it on anything but a Winchester action. That said, I'd probably take the advice of many here who have poured money into a factory rifle and buy a custom action and start there.
If I was only going to make minor upgrades to either one, I'd probably pick the FN even if I wasn't biased toward the design. The reason I'd consider that is that FN has factory rifles out there that cost in the $2500 range. If you go to sell your PBR XP, with upgrades completed, it's going to be much easier for someone to compare your rifle to the higher-dollar factory FN rifles and their features than a Savage.
In the end I wonder why I wasted my time making this post, though, because if you have to ask this question, you probably should be spending far more time at the range learning to shoot, and far less time wasted thinking about what new gadget you're going to pay someone to put on your rifle. Equipment is great to talk about on the Internet and in the theoretical, but the fact is that if you haven't spent enough time behind a rifle to know your preferences and learn proper technique, what you need is a boatload of ammunition and time on a range....not a particular piece of equipment.
