Manners PRS-1 actually. Can you provide a little more color on what was wrong?
Before getting into what my issue was I have 2 questions.
- Does your PRS-1 have the mini chassis?
- Did you make sure your recoil lug was in contact with the chassis lug when you torqued the action screws?? If not, even a few thousands gap & 65 inch pounds is not enough (not even close) to prevent the lug from hammering (exaggerated) the chassis lug every shot. I.E. it will fuck up barrel harmonics. The action needs to be pulled back so the lug is in hard contact when the action screws are torqued. Some guys snug the screws and then stand up and bounce gun on the recoil pad to seat it before final torque. My choice would be to use a strap wrapped around top front of pic rail - down behind trigger guard, thus pulling the action down and back.
Like you, I caught the bug for long range precision. I
needed wanted a new precision bolt gun. Acctualy I caught it bad (3 more builds in the works, all snipers hide's fault). Pretty funny considering I haven't shot a bolt gun in 15-20 years. Everything has been auto loaders. Slug gun = Benelli SBE with Shaw rifled barrel, Meat rifle = Rem 7400 35 Whelen, Mini 14, Ar 15's, Ar 10, 10/22 etc.
I will try to summarize & will likely start a thread with the longer version, but here goes.
My Manners issue is a Zebra of different stripes (Steyr THB Manners 6.5 Creed). My plan is to try this in production class PRS. Bought it new & before going to the range, I'd planned to pull the barreled action to drill the stock for an arca rail. I noticed the barrel wasn't centered in the barrel channel. It wasn't touching anywhere, just not centered.
What I found was the barrel was in contact with the channel at bottom just in front of the lug. This wasn't letting the action settle all the way down into the V block chassis (that was my theory). No biggie, I just relieved that area & mocked it back up. With the action screws snug, I could still slide the barrel/front of action side to side in the channel = about 1/8" @ front of stock. O my, WTF is going on here?
My understanding of how the mini chassis works is that its suppose to provide 6 points of contact + recoil lug. 2 x V block @ front of action, 2 x V block rear action, 1 x radius bottom rear, 1 x radius bottom front, + recoil lug.
In my case the action was hitting the 3 points of contact at the rear, and none at the front except for the recoil lug and the flat shelf behind my lug. That "shelf" part of the chassis was to high by .0035 holding the action up out of the v block & resulted in all that side to side slop. I wound up milling the shelf on the mini chassis down .040 & bedding recoil lug area with Pro bed 2000 (for like $12 you get everything needed). I now have full chassis contact & the bedding will not allow any for/aft movement.
The test group that came with the rifle was 3 shots .7 MOA with factory Hornady 147 ELD-M & I'm assuming that was a machine or fixture rest. My first (and only) attempt at a group during barrel break in (shots 20-25) was 5 shots .4 MOA @ 100 with Factory 147 ELD-M. That was off a bench with bi-pod, rear bag, and auto loader extrodinare pulling the trigger. Pretty sure I'd flunk the shooter evaluation @ one of Frank's classes (not the safety part).
Based on factory test target, I'm sure I'd have been shooting 1+ MOA 5 shot groups & been very disappointed, had I not caught the problem and fixed it.
