Ruger MkII bolt question

[pepperbelly]

Is it necessary to do anything to the bolt or bolt face on a Ruger MkII to improve accuracy? I used my old bolt in a VQ LLV Upper. Does the bolt even matter?
I only ask this since I know truing the bolt face on rifles helps accuracy. Of course they also true up the rear of the receiver and lap the lugs, so I don't know if the bolt on a semi-auto needs this.

Thanks,
Jim

[Riss]

It could be good to true up the bolt face. Depends on how much free space there is over the rim and if the bolt is marked up or has any burrs. If it looks anything like mine it could use a little cleaning up. Also did the one on my 10/22. It shot a little better after getting trued up. Was a tack driver though before I did any work on it.

[1911ONR]

I don't know about truing up the bolt face. I have never heard of doing that on a Mk-II. My 10/22 have had it done. The only thing I do with my Mk-IIs is to replace the extractor with a Volquartsen EDM extractor. There's a wealth of information at www.rimfirecentral.com

[SlamFire1]

I only ask this since I know truing the bolt face on rifles helps accuracy. Of course they also true up the rear of the receiver and lap the lugs, so I don't know if the bolt on a semi-auto needs this.

I am only discussing hand held rifles, not bench rest. Any accurate rifle held in the arms/hands of a human, the human is the limiting factor.

I am a skeptic about “truing” anything but the receiver face. That’s so the barrel will be in line with the receiver and I won’t have to crank some god awful amount of windage for a zero.

Many rifles have hardened surfaces. I don’t think machining off or reducing that wear surface is a good idea. I have looked at the parkerization wear pattern on the lugs on my supermatch M1a’s and match Garands. With irons these rifles are capable of shooting sub MOA. I will see 70%-80% wear, which indicates to me that the lugs are not in 100% contact, and yet the rifles are capable of winning the National Matches.

If the rifle is badly out of spec, where one lug has less than 50% contact, then maybe truing makes sense to balance out the load on the bolt and receiver. But that is about it.

As for truing bolt faces, it messes things up. Like extractor tension, distance from firing pin to primer.

For a gas gun I think the idea of truing a bolt face to be even more ridiculous. In all rifles there is always distance between the bolt and the breech of the barrel. In an action like a M700, this distance is so small that powder particles will bind up the action. Most actions have a lot of space. In a gas gun, that bolt is traveling at high velocity and the breech face is the bolt stop. And in a gas gun, that crunch distance is amount the brass gets resized.. How truing the bolt face is going to make any difference in anything after all that slamming and banging is a mystery to me.

When you toss out the human factor, the first order things in rifle accuracy are good barrels, good bullets, and good bedding.