Rifle Accurizing
Griffin & Howe has been building and accurizing rifles for 100 years. Whether you’re looking at buying a second-hand bolt-action rifle or want to build a fully custom setup, we offer an extensive building and accurizing service.
Benefits of Accurizing Rifles
Our gunsmithing department has developed a reputation for turning poor performing rifles into highly accurate tools. Whether you’re a competition shooter or a seasoned hunter, we can help ensure your rifle has increased accuracy so you can make the shot that counts.
Diagnosis
Barreling
Perhaps the rifle you purchased came with a mass-produced barrel with leftover tooling marks or rough or inconsistent bores. A factory rifle may also suffer from misaligned bores or chambers.
Alternatively, if you had a previously accurate rifle that’s recently started shooting larger group sizes, the barrel may have acquired damage from throat wear, corrosion or improper maintenance.
If the rifle’s accuracy issues are caused by a bad barrel, we can rebarrel the action with a custom barrel, with chamber and threads cut square to the blueprinted action. This can greatly improve accuracy and the rifle’s ability to shoot consistently.
Another benefit of replacing the barrel is it can also give you the option to change the chambering to a different cartridge. If needed, Griffin & Howe can order a custom rifle barrel in the appropriate rifling twist rate for the ballistic coefficient of the bullet you wish to shoot, and install it on your action.
Where appropriate, we also indicate and crown the barrel using an 11-degree target crown, to ensure the bullet exits the muzzle in as accurate a manner as possible
Squaring the Action
Squaring or ‘truing’ the action requires removing the barrel from the action in order to blueprint the action by squaring up all the surfaces. This is done by machining and lapping parts of the action, so each critical component is square to the centerline of the receiver and provides perfectly even contact on all mating surfaces.
This includes working over the receiver face, threads, and locking lug recess. The corresponding squaring on the bolt then needs to be done to the locking lugs and bolt face. Once this is done, the bolt can be hand-lapped into the action where the locking lugs of the bolt fully contact the lug recess of the action
Bedding the Action
The final step would be bedding the action to the stock. Aside from the barrel quality, the way the action fits in the stock is one of the biggest factors in enabling your rifle to shoot accurately.
The main goal of bedding the action is to make sure there is a solid foundation between the barreled action and the stock, and to eliminate problematic bearing surfaces on the recoil lug. This prevents the action from shifting when the rifle is fired and allows for greater rifle accuracy in long-range shooting.
We start with opening the barrel channel in order to free-float the barrel where appropriate. Then, while testing for results, we let the barrel harmonics determine whether the barrel should stay free-floated, or if we need to control the harmonics through a pressure bed. We use glass bedding or, where appropriate, a devcon steel bed and/or pillar bedding techniques.
Custom wood stocks are typically inlet to a gap-free fit. For clients with high-end rifles, we can maintain the highest levels of wood-to-metal fit and still obtain a solution for accuracy issues.
Synthetic stocks are always free-floated prior to any accuracy work. They can also benefit from glass bedding or pillar bedding
Trigger Adjustment
A heavy trigger with a long and creepy trigger pull is a major detriment to accurate shooting. We can adjust your trigger or install an aftermarket trigger to help reduce the trigger pull weight.
