Your best hunting rifle? Here's mine.

[Nature Boy]

View attachment 839097

Please excuse the yellowed photo, copied from an old slide, taken about 1960, when I was 16 yrs. old. It's a Savage 110, bought about the first year of production, but with a Bishop blank stock that I tried to configure to match a Weatherby. It fit me very well and I glass-bedded the action, free-floated the barrel, and applied 14 coats of thinned varnish.

Being in high school, I didn't have much money, so bought/mounted a Weaver K 2.5 and went on to shoot dozens of varmints and a deer with it. It shot handloads under 1 MOA and I shot one woodchuck at 450 yards with it (second shot). Also, shot a power line in a valley, (accidentally) while trying to hit a woodchuck at about 600 yards. Missed the chuck, but it made a spectacular "fail".

Like a dummy, I sold it and bought a Rem 700, .22-250. The guy who bought it still has and loves it. I offered to buy it back a couple of years ago, but he wouldn't sell. He said he'd probably be buried with it.

Picher,

You failed to tell us what cartridge it was chambered in.

The fact that you can’t buy it back from the guy you sold it to says a lot

 

[Garandimal]

Ole Meat-gitter.

'83 M700 BDL .270 Win w/ a Vari-X II 3-9x40mm.

​

But recently stocked the bullpen w/ a trio of honeys.




GR

 

[Offfhand]

I won't claim this is my "best" hunting rifle, and I can't say it is necessarily my favorite either. But it will always have an honored space in my gun room because of the DWCT factor. It came into being back when I was just out of university and doing some very amateur do-it-yourself gunsmithing because I couldn't afford new guns. So I had Douglas fit a new barrel to a surplus '98 style Mauser and do other necessary alterations to convert to .458 Win Mag. I then fitted a semi-finished Pachmayer stock, tried my amateur hand at checkering the stock, altered bolt handle (Very poor job of it) fitted sights and scope mount with a hand drill (another poor job, sights are off center) and had the metal blued by local parttime gunsmith. My shooting pals thought it was hilarious for me or anyone in our group to want a .458 Mag and laughed even more when I told them I was building the rifle to hunt elephants. But 6 years later my fortunes had improved and I was on safari with my homemade .458, using it to kill a couple of nice tuskers. On subsequent hunts I used it to bag more elephant, plus lions and a bunch of cape buffalo. . .

 

[horsemen61]

Offhand great story better rifle!

 

[Trey Veston]

Mel Smart built custom Pre-`64 Model 70 in .35 Whelen. Built for Alaskan moose hunting. Dad gave it to me about 20 years ago.