What is the rifle that has surprised you the most

1. A bog standard Remington 700sps I paid $500 for. It shot a 168gr A max in front of 2208 as good as a full blown custom rifle.

2. A Marlin XS7 in 223, I got for free because it was miss-feeding and quote "it's gonna get thrown off a bridge if you don't want it". 10 mins with some pliers got the magazine sorted and feeding again. It shot everything from 55gr soft points to 75gr A Max effortlessly in little groups. Shot heaps of goats and steel at long range.

Both guns I should of just left alone and used.

Anschutz 1530 in .222. A friend sold it to me for AUD$250 because “it won’t hit the side of a shed”.

Spend three nights in a row running Sweets through it, produced some beautiful bright blue sticky pools of gloop.

Final patch out revealed some pitting midway along the barrel. Threw an old 10x Tasco scope on it, ran some Rem factory 50gn SPs through it for around 1” at 100m. Paid the $250.

Didn’t take much time to find a load it liked with ADI AR2207 and 40gn vmax. Found a second hand stock with a much higher comb. Great little walk about fox whistling rifle.

As I bought it
Attachment 273116

Refinished stock
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Marcus

Sako Nagant M-28

After reading all the praise of them by American gun writers I imported one from Finland. Turns out a Finnish Nagant is a turd rolled in glitter,much like a Lada with a body kit on it,it's still a peasent grade heap of shit. Took ages to sell the fucking thing too.

Ended up lubing the bolt with bar oil because it screeched when you operated it.

A Stirling M1500 .22WMR. Cost me $200 second hand. Mounted Tasco rings and a Japanese made Tasco 3-9 x 40 on it and it just never seemed to miss. I used to stock up on RWS ammo when I went to Aussie which was a 40 grain semi jacketed hollow point load at a genuine 2000 fps. The damage it did on large wallabies with that RWS ammo was all out of proportion to its ballistics. The trigger was around two pounds with no over travel and made for accurate shooting.

Another one for the JW-15 club. My first rifle when i was 16, put a little 4x nikko stirling scope on it and it did the job. 10rd mag that came with was crappy, i spent hours trying to get it to feed all 10 rounds correctly. It always seemed inferior.

But I had to 'upgrade' to a Ruger 10-22 a couple of years later to find out how good it actually was. The 10/22 was my dream of semi automatic possum hunting pleasure, with a 2-7 vari power scope, synthetic stock, suppressor and all, felt very pleased with myself. That was when i found out the JW-15 trigger actually felt pretty good, at least a lot better than the 10-22 mushy clunk. I was disappointed as the 10-22 was a little less accurate. And it turned out the cheap nikko scope actually had good clear crisp optics, i could never get the 2-7 to focus as crisply. The JW15 fit me well too, and balanced well whereas the ruger felt awkward. Sunk cost fallacy kicked in and i stuck with the ruger, but like others regret parting with the norinco ever since.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Micky Duck

.270 when it blew up with wrong powder in a reload.

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Still got all your fingers? Let's hope

I bought my first gun a tikka 270 and got 3 boxes of ammo with it .what i didn't notice was one of them was 7mmo8 ammo .in my excitement as a young lad i was sighting it in and enjoying shooting it when I reached for the second box of ammo .ended up loading the mag and fireing a 7mm08 round down it .it went back boooooom all right ....leassions where learnt the fast hard was this day @ c-dog do you rember this ?

Brought a Krico 600 in .270 cal 1981. West German rifle - payed about $400 second hand - brilliant rifle. 3 shot box mag. Had the rifle for about 24 yrs - never saw another hunter with a Krico. Premium rifles in the day, probably still are?