Thread: Rifles you wish you never sold

Wouldn't be a 597 by any chance I got lucky and got a good one

Originally Posted by northdude

Wouldn't be a 597 by any chance I got lucky and got a good one

Why yes yes it was. And its was the mags giving issues. Its still lying in the back of the safe beside the other "lemmington"

An old friend of mine has a 597 in 17hmr. His works fine and he had a theory on why they blew up also. His when fully loaded occasionally tipped the bullet up.
He reckons that was when they would go boom. The bolt would hit the rim and set everything off.
He doesn't load his mag to full capacity-so far happy chappy

I recently got given a .17HMR M597 with a cracked receiver. I intend to make a new one out of tooling grade aluminium just to see how it performs. I have done a lot remedial work on the utterly crap 597's over the years so that experience may result in something a bit more reliable. Time will tell!

I had a tikka 7rm rechambered to 7mm wsm by Robbie Tiffany about 10 years ago. I had just started reloading and worked up a few different/random combos. By about the 6th set of reloads i by some fluke managed to get 3 berger 168's though the same hole @100 yards. The first time this happened I thought that rounds 2 and 3 completely missed the target!
I had the rifle set up with a 300 yard zero and got so confident with the rifle that I was shooting fallow in the head and neck at 300! Back then I didn't realise how good of a shooter this thing was and sold it to play with other calibers and have ever since being trying to get back to that kind of accuracy, repeatability and confidence in a shooter!