Old Barrel was a Homemade Sleeve
OK, now that I have a "proper" commercial bull barrel on my Savage action, I feel more comfortable about confessing exactly what the "old barrel" was. A photo is attached.
This was an $85 factory sporter 7mm08 barrel that shot fair to poor. I could NOT get it to shoot well enough to make me happy, so I decided to replace it. What to do with the throw-away barrel? No one else would want it, knowing that I had discarded it.... I remembered that some benchrest rifles are made by "sleeving" a Remington 700 action (to make it more STIFF) and I wondered if anyone does that to barrels.
According to an essay on the Lilja (barrel-maker) web site, the stiffness (and thus accuracy) of a barrel increases by the 4th power of the diameter, and decreases by the third power of the length. Short, fat, best accuracy.
Sure enough, there is a company that does just that!
http://www.gunsamerica.com/blog/extreme-accuracy-makeover-the-teludyne-tti-tech-straightjacket/ For some few hundreds of $$, I could have a barrel sleeved.... But I of course wasn't going to do that to my throw-away barrel, so I decided to try a "homemade" sleeve..... 3/4" galvanized steel waterpipe, Home Depot, cut to length, inserted until it stops on the slope of the sporter barrel, then very very carefully "poured" warmed JBWeld into the gap a bit at a time and tried hard to avoid any "voids". I have not xrayed it, so I don't know how bad the remaining voids are, but I got it reasonably centered with matchsticks.
It then proceeded to shoot noticeably better groups! Of course, nothing changed about the location of the "lands" or the chamber dimensions. The "first shot" error became PAINFULLY OBVIOUS now that the gun could easily pull off pretty reasonable groups time after time. That is what led to this thread -- I had a barrel that could shoot reasonable groups, but would NOT put the "first shot" near that group, and hence was still a big problem for hunting.... thus my request for advice, that led to all these posts......
So now, we'll soon see if the Shilen commercial barrel, tuned up via the OCW process, can conquer the first shot problem!