JerrySharrett
Senile Member
There is no argument that a rifle can not be built so the action centerline is in alignment with the surfaces of the stock that guides the recoil track. Not a lot of guns are set up this precise but the good ones are and an accomplished stocker like Terry Leonard or Tom Meredith certainly can.Jerry,
My contention is that all of the measuring in the world cannot accomplish this, I mean it's like setting a motor and "carb" to exactly where you think it needs to be........ until you fire that badboy up and tune it on the dyno all the pre-measuring is just ballpark. Sametime, screwing on another barrel and getting it to hit within an inch is by-golly luck for sure! But by the same token getting one to be more than 3-4" off no matter how you line it up to chamber is rare.
I've got no meaningful opinion as to whether your method of trying to measure the rifle up so that the muzzle hole is lined up exactly with the centerline of the bolt makes for more or less side forces BUT..... think about this. If you were to set up and chamber three barrels: one of them is "straight", one of them has .005 of curvature and one has .010 of curvature but in all cases the muzzle of the bore is exactly in front of the firing pin. Are they all going to recoil the same? Most rifle bores seem to describe a kind of helix, it'd be pretty hard to predict anything from them.
still fun to argue though
Thanks Jerry,
al
That being said, just as the chamber must be in that alignment with the above assembly. Then too the EXIT POINT of the bullet must fit within this same centerline for the gun to track consistently.
Think about this, the indexing effort is to get barrel pointing UP so misalignment does not cause lateral recoil shift. Why? So DOWNWARD forces of recoil will force the gun into the bags and does not force the assembly sideways where stability of the setup can be effected.
All barrels have a wandering, or compound curve, in the bore cylinder. Nothing can be done about this problem, But if the entry point of the bullet fits precisely within the bore center at that entry point and the exit point of that bullet is also along that same centerline regardless how the bullet wanders from entry to exit then the barrel will perform much more accurately than if the bullet exits in another direction.
Gene has the perfect facility to determine th cause and solutions to the barrel curvature problem. Indexing is just a step along the way, but it is not the solution itself since indexing does not solve the problem, it just moves the problem to a location where it is less harmful to accuracy.