Talk About Worth the Wait

Back in January,I decided to use some of the money I made in the fall from gunsmithing to order a barrel for my first custom rifle that I had built back in 1981.It was a 280 Remington barrel,made by Shilen.After almost 40 years of hunting and target shooting,it had finally started losing accuracy,going from less than 1 MOA to more than two.The round count was very close to 3,000.I've learned how to do my own barrel and action work over the years,and I usually get along good.I ordered a Shilen Select Match that was threaded and deep chambered for the 280 Ackley Improved.It's close to a factory varmint contour,26 inches long,and as it turned out,it's very well made.With the Covid thing going on,I'd pretty much given up hope of getting it at all,but back in early June,I got an email that said it was on the way.The evening after the email,the old barrel was off and I went to work truing up the action.I was never overly impressed with the way it shot with the old barrel,it did shoot good,but not great.When I got the barrel off,the action was not pretty.It looked like the front of the action had been trued up with a bench grinder.The "gunsmith" who built it was famous for being lazy and not too concerned with sweating the details like one should when one wants to do a good job for one's customers.But that's water under the bridge.I was able to get it straightened up and I installed the new tube with minimal headspace.It barely closes on the go gauge.The bullet of choice for it was the Berger 168 grain Classic Hunter,and I was hoping to get 2900 FPS out of it if the accuracy was good enough.I chose the 280 AI because I have a pile of brass,and I like the performance numbers.Plus,I have a Magpul Hunter 700 stock with their detachable magazine setup.I combined barrel break in and fire forming,cleaning every shot for 30 rounds.It was shooting better than the old barrel,and I was shooting 140 grain Game Kings,hardly what you can call a match bullet.When I was finally able to load some good stuff,I tried 5 different powders with the Bergers,and with all but IMR7828,the groups were in the .3's and 4's.Kinda doesn't make loading for it very difficult.I've been around and shot some great rifles over the years,but never anything like this.I'm going to post some pics as soon as time allows.I just wanted to share my experience with this really great rifle.I have all summer to shoot it,and other than stiffening up the powder charge to see if I can manage to get my goal of 2900 FPS,I'm going to call it finished.And I don't think that's going to be a huge task because it hit mid 28's this morning.I'm not really used to a crazy accurate rifle like this,but I think I can get used to it.Thanks for reading such a long winded post.