and I admit I've been a bit scathing in the past too . . .. but a bit of desperation drove me to it. In a particularly stupid move of self harm some time ago I sold a very accurate Lithgow LA102 308, and nothing since has replaced it as a rifle that would throw a middleweight projectile a a decent distance with some authority. I wanted at least 120 gns of boolit (but ideally not more than 150 gns) with enough snot to take large animals at 4-500M and efficient enough to be able to hold "edge of plate" in most ordinary wind conditions,also to 500M.
So when a modestly priced Tikka T3 6.5x55 that looked like it hadn't done much work came upon trademe I thought it might fill the bill .... and I already had a Boyds laminated stock for it to stiffen up the ergonomics. The stock has bought the weight up to a nice level for "deliberate" shooting, and I might yet add a wee bit of ballast, but already it handles well enough to usually see fall of shot.
And does it shoot, YUP - like a flaming laser. I did a bit of figuring in GRT and used its OCW tool to identify some potential nodes. My magnetospeed crony doesn't work with suppressors, and I have to be pretty mindful of noise here, so I just fired a few test rounds into the ground to establish a baseline - it looked like at about 2830 fps with the Sierra 130 TMK's I would be in a node.
And today I shot it at 100M , in horrible conditions, across a strong turbulent westerly - I'd say I could probably reduce group sizes by 30 to 50% in ideal conditions. The rifle came with 10 rounds of Federal 140gn power-shok ammo, and in a nice twist of fate, I picked up a further 20 "unboxed" rounds of the same stuff for $20 at a LGS. This it shot into an initial first group of 30mm,the subsequent two groups both just on 22mm, pretty good for factory ammo in any conditions. Now I was starting to get the feel of it and my first reloads went into a 14.5mm group, and the balance were just as good. The load "on the OCW node" was 17mm, but with practically no vertical, just a horizontal dispersion (mostly due to wind I'd say).
Can't hate that sort of performance, call me a Tikka "fanboi" and I won't "bite" (much). I'm looking forward to getting to the range in nice conditions with a chrony and play with some larger sample sizes and seating depths-I'd be confident its easily a 1/2 MOA rifle!
