Thread: Best ways to save loose weight?

Righto so looking at making a few changes to one of my rifles... want to make her into a lightweight 5-500m go to rig.

What are the best ways to drop some weight from her, its currently a Remington 700 Mountain rifle in .270 with laminated stock. The action barrel and weigh 5.63 pounds and by the time i put a carbon stock on is looking to be close to 7 pounds.

Barrel is already thin countour so fluting is not an option, but will fluting the bolt and changing the firing pin to a lightweight one save much weight and if so approximately how much? Would ideally like to get it down between 6-6.5 pounds.

What is the best light weight set of rings/bases available in 30mm? Wanting to put a VX-6 2-12 CDS on top.

Or are there any existing threads showing a break down of ways to save weight, i couldn't find any?

Cheers
Nick

lift a weight

That would be to easy and no fun .

Bore it out to a bigger calibre?

Buy a Kimber,
If you want to shoot to 500 then a little weight isnt a bad thing.

Dont really like the stocks on Kimbers mate, just realised i made a muck up in the initial post. 5.63 pounds is including the bushnell 4200 3-9x40 and rings as well, so would be just under 7 pounds all up.

So wondering about the savings from bolt fluting etc to try bring it down closer to 6.5 pounds? I know its not heavy either way but i like the idea of a real light weight rifle, most of my hunting is bush stalking and in all reality probably 99% of my shots are stand up at 10-50m, i just want the options for summer tops missions etc aswell.

Shit my rifle weighs 10lbs all up loaded with suppressor, sling, scope, etc. I'm okay with it. Once you start worrying about saving every gram you'll never be happy. Just carry it and forget about it.

I haven't weighed it but my main rifle is probably 10 pound with scope and rings no suppressor and no ammo.

It is the easiest thing to carry of all the shit I carry.

If you really want light cut the barrel off at the fore end.

The carbon stock will definitely lighten it up a bit. Really though if you continue down this road how much bang for your buck are you getting? If it is to make your rifle cool / a project for you, well go for it. If you want to go further and faster may be going for a couple of runs would work better? What is a couple of 100 grams of rifle when you are aiming to carry out 20+ kg of meat. My 2 cents.

A lightweight firing pin in my Model 7 saves 1.9 oz. Fluting the bolt probably won't save that much again, but should see total weight savings of apprx 3 oz.
Talley rings are the lightest. Gunworks sells for approx $105, they do need lapping though.

You can loose a lot of weight from a pack by deciding what is absolutely necessary vs luxury. Look carefully at food, cookers etc. Do you need a pretty stainless mug when a light cheap plastic mug works, that sort of idea.

Talleys lightweight alloy rings

Ditching the scope and rings and using iron sights will save you ~400gms

Cheers

I had no idea how much could be saved by making these minor changes so wanted to know the weights so i could weigh up my options and decide whether they are worth doing, or whether to just make the major changes and be done with it. By the sounds of it they are not worth doing, as you say a weight saving of 100 grams is bugger all, if by doing this it was going to bring it down say 500 grams then i probably would have gone for it.

Call gunworks - they will be able to tell you what they can shave off it. Light rifles rule but the $ involved might be more than any savings are worth..

The bit above about the light pack is the MAIN thing you can save weight on. I can usually lift my weekend pack on one finger without compromising warmth and safety at all. For the $ spent shaving 200g off a rifle you could probably drop 5kg +++ off your pack. Army studies actually show that the best place to remove weight is from your boots!