Thread: Causes of accuracy in a rifle

I don't think you can answer the question properly without a little more context, are we talking a rifle that already shoots well but want to improve upon, a custom build from the base up or a rifle that doesn't shoot well.

A rifle with either; poor bedding, crap barrel, crap action or bad ammo will not shoot well.
A un-ergonomic stock or crap trigger can be overcome but the above factors cannot.

If you have a rifle that shoots well but you are wanting to squeeze more accuracy from it, the first thing to do is always hand loading ammo.
99% of the time a good hand load will out shoot factory ammo.

A lot of rifles come out with good barrels these days and in many cases you don't need to replace the factory barrel for the rifle too shoot well but that doesn't mean the rifle wont shoot better with a custom barrel. Tikkas are well known for having good barrels and being accurate right out of the box, but in the USA it's pretty common for guys to rebarrel them with a quality custom barrel and the accuracy does improve along with the velocity as it's common for Tikka factory barrels to produce lower velocities that other barrels.

Some rifles respond well to being glass bedded or but in an aftermarket stock but these days it seems less common, or at least is required less often.
It's very common for folk to replace the stock on target rifle with a chassis that has a built in bedding block, majority of the time this is done for ergonomic reasons or for attaching bipods and other shooting aids that help them to shoot better. Often they get increased accuracy but it's not always a given.

So in the absence of any context and assuming there is no factor that is bad, I'd place things in this order to improve accuracy;
Hand loading
Re-barrel
Bedding
Action

Stock and trigger are both last with the caveat they don't effect the mechanical accuracy of the rifle but in many ways will make a rifle easy or difficult to shoot well.
Thus if I had a rifle that shot well already but wanted to improve, I'd do it in this order.

Hand load
Stock with bedding block
Trigger
Barrel
Action