Fella's;
For about the fourth time, I shall attempt to post about my dream gun.
But first, a little history. I purchased a centerfire rifle for my son' 16th birthday, quite a few years ago now. It was in 6.5 X 55mm, AKA a 6.5 Swede. As I reloaded for it and saw it's performance on game, I developed a fairly serious Jones to get one for myself. The rather large fly in the ointment is that left hand bolt guns in 6.5 Swede are somewhat hard to come by. Mannlicherr-Schoenauer was supposed to have imported some LHB 6.5's in the late 40's - early 50's, but go try to find one. Note, I didn't say; go try to find one for sale, I said go try to find one - period. I've never run across one in the flesh. Can't complain though, if I did have one I certainly wouldn't sell it.
After about a dozen or fifteen years, of wanna, I got serious about it. I found that I could buy a commercial gun if it was a Blaser or a Mauser G3. Both of which have a rather Weird Alice action, and both are expensive enough to do a custom gun. Furthermore, doing a custom does allow you to spend money at your own rate rather than risk meeting a nice man who's also a good divorce lawyer.
Custom it was. The action is a left hand Tikka, which immediately went off to the smith to be trued and have a Lilja 22" medium weight sporter barrel attached. He also got rid of the floating recoil lug and replaced it with a conventional sandwich type. The nice thing was that he got the hex pattern flats of the Tikka action matched perfectly. The barrel was throated for the Sierra 140 grain GameKing bullet, at a decent OAL. A major reason the Tikka action was picked was that it can accommodate the proper length Swede round in the magazine, no problem. It's my opinion that the Swede should not be put in a short action gun, it just ain't right.
Rob Smith had just received several nice walnut blanks from his supplier and gave me first choice of them for the stock. I think I done good on the pickin', but then I'm prejudiced too. In any case, Rob did the entire stock in house. It did not go out for profiling and inletting, he did it all. And a very fine job he did too. Tom Stevens did his usual exemplary job of checkering, and did the final finish also.
At that point I'd secured a Zeiss Conquest 3.5-10X 44mm scope with mil-dot reticle for the gun and the Talley mounts for it also. All of it went to Dennis Erhardt of the Frontier Gun Shop in Helena Montana for bluing. He managed to get both the barreled action and mounts blued to match the Zeiss. A wonderful job on his part.
The load for the gun produces 2725 fps over my Oehler 35P chrono and normally shoots just sub-.5". However, the best group I've ever seen out of the gun nearly stopped my heart. It was a .261", out of a sporter weight barrel! The load works rather well on game animals too.
Sorry, no pics, I'm an old film guy and the young computer whiz kids aren't smart enough to make instructions easy enough for me to follow. Sold the digital camera, I don't need to do those kinda things to my blood pressure again.
Oh, and I do have another candidate for dream gun in the works at this time.
900F