TargetTalk

Why are so many apparently great target rifles totally unadjustabe in stock?

You can pay many hundreds for an Anschutz (to pick just one example) which doesn't even have the basic stock adjustments available. How in H*ll's name can you shoot your best with one of these?

Yesyes, I know, the top guns have top barrels and top triggers and top sights, but when you add your own noise to the shots, these factors are simply not contributing enough to overcome your own noise. So you absolutely MUST reduce your own noise - by fitting the gun to your frame properly, for one thing.

Are we just suckers for accepting guns which are simply not adjustable? Is your body shape the same as mine, and as the next guy, and the next? I don't think so.

How much does it cost to put a rudimentary adjustable cheek piece and pull length into a stock? I'd say $20 each. Add a trigger adjustable for travel and weight, maybe another $40, absolute tops, using the best materials for the job.

But we have to add many hundreds of $$ to get these features. Yep, we're suckers all right.

Please let us know when you have these items available for sale at anywhere near the prices you've quoted. I'm sure you will have lots of interest from board members.

The best deals I've found are $185 for four way buttplate to retro-fit, about $100 for the cheek piece adjustment hardware which then has to be retro-fit, and $85 for a Rifle Basics trigger (which may not be adjustable for travel).

Waisted wrote:Why are so many apparently great target rifles totally unadjustabe in stock?

You can pay many hundreds for an Anschutz (to pick just one example) which doesn't even have the basic stock adjustments available. How in H*ll's name can you shoot your best with one of these?
.

I'm not quite sure why you are posting this question.

Currently all Anschutz, Feinwerkbau, Walther and Bleiker rifles (the ones that win the medals) ARE fitted with totally adjustable stocks. You can tailor the length of pull, butt height, offset, cant, grip position, cheekpiece height, offset, angle etc.

If you are asking "Why does a 40 year old second hand rifle not have the same fancy stock as a much more expensive brand new rifle?". Then I think you have answered your own question.

It's a fact that older rifles have less ergonomic adjustment. This isn't a scam perpetrated by greedy and evil factories. This was just the fashion. If a stock didn't fit, the shooter either put up with it, or made it fit by chiselling, sawing, or adding epoxy.

I think it's unreasonable to expect that older rifles be the same as much newer brand new ones. It's the same for other things, like cars or computers, that technology has made great improvements.

Anschutz, Walther et al have comstantly refined and improved their stock designs. Adjustable cheekpeices were introduced for top-end models (but not UIT Standard rifles, as the rufles forbade these) in the 1970s. LOP adjustment for butts was a feature for the 1950-60s.

Tim S
Taunton UK

Wood is easy to work on.
If a stock doesn't fit, adding a spacer to the butt, rasping some off the cheekpiece or grip, adding a little with pookie or grafting on more walnut is pretty simple.

Like the rest of these kids, OP doesn't understand why Phidippides didn't just text everybody.

If the gun fits, it fits.
Matt Emmons has won olympic medals with a wooden stock.

Waisted, I'm not sure what you mean by totally unadjustable stocks, the only thing you can't easily adjust on a modern wooden stock is the grip, as it's part of the stock. Apart from that you can shift the handstop, sights, cheek piece and adjust the butt plate in a trillion different ways.
The alu stocks generally now allow you to twist and tilt the pistol grip, but that's really the only additional thing they have over wooden stocks. That functionality can't be added to wood stocks as the grip is structurally significant. You can't make a alu-stock design in wood, it isn't physically strong or stiff enough.

As you mention, there are tons of different stocks out there. The idea is you buy the one that fits you best in the first place, so that it only requires a few tweaks to match it to your position. The idea is not that you pick any old random stock off the shelf and then practically rebuild it to suit you.

As others have mentioned, the other thing with wood is it is easily worked if you are so inclined (which is very much more difficult with metal stocks), so you can file and shave bits off if you want, whereas with metal you have to adjust what you're given and that's it.

As for your $20 comment. You have no clue regarding manufacturing processes do you? The amount of R&D work that goes into ensuring the rifle remains stiff despite having adjustable functions, and ensuring it still shoots straight is absolutely enormous.
Every time you make something adjustable you create a whole new set of variables.
And then having developed the system, your manufacturing process is vastly complicated (and made more expensive) as compared to just making a non-adjustable or limited-adjustability version.

Plenty of people have tried to sell budget shooting gear. None have made a success of it. The prices are where they are because those are the costs involved in developing and making the product, and being able to take a little extra to put back into the development of the next generation product.

Waisted wrote:Why are so many apparently great target rifles totally unadjustabe in stock?

They are pretty much all adjustable

Waisted wrote:You can pay many hundreds for an Anschutz (to pick just one example) which doesn't even have the basic stock adjustments available. How in H*ll's name can you shoot your best with one of these?

Anschutz target stocks are highly adjustable. Their hunting stocks are less adjustable, and are consummately cheaper.

Waisted wrote:Yesyes, I know, the top guns have top barrels and top triggers and top sights, but when you add your own noise to the shots, these factors are simply not contributing enough to overcome your own noise. So you absolutely MUST reduce your own noise - by fitting the gun to your frame properly, for one thing.

So what you're saying is you're not as good as Matt Emmons, so you want the gun to overcome your inadequacies so you can shoot the same as him?
And yes, as I say, the idea is you buy a stock that pretty much fits your frame from the start, and then tweak it. You can't just pick up any random stock and expect to be able to adjust it to fit any person. Some people can handle big heavy stocks, some need small light ones. You have to buy an appropriate stock in the first place.

Waisted wrote:Are we just suckers for accepting guns which are simply not adjustable? Is your body shape the same as mine, and as the next guy, and the next? I don't think so.

Which is why they are adjustable.

Waisted wrote:How much does it cost to put a rudimentary adjustable cheek piece and pull length into a stock? I'd say $20 each. Add a trigger adjustable for travel and weight, maybe another $40, absolute tops, using the best materials for the job.

But we have to add many hundreds of $$ to get these features. Yep, we're suckers all right.

Lets consider adding an adjustable cheekpiece to a wooden stock.
Compared to just planing a nice fixed, smooth comb onto the stock, the skilled gun smith (earning >$20/hr) now has to hollow the butt out to accept the metal block that the cheekpiece will lock into.
This means he has to buy a milling machine, which is expensive.
To do a decent job he's then going to have to spend considerable time getting the whole thing perfectly squared up on the milling machine's deck. The whole process could take somewhere in the region of 40minutes. So that already $15 in wages, as well as the purchase, maintenance and running costs of the milling machine.
Having milled the slot, he then needs the actual metal block to fit tinside the slot he's just milled. This is going to need to be CNC machined, which either involves buying a very expensive machine and setting up the program, or paying someone else to do it (so we're looking well over $20/unit on delivery), and the gunsmith then has to fit it.
You're looking at well over $70 in wages and materials at this point.
And that's just to make the stock accept an adjustable cheekpiece. He still has to make the cheekpiece and the adjustable slider unit that it will be fitted onto.

There are a few bits that are expensive though. How you can justify £50 for a single sight-raising block is beyond me. No fitting involved, it's just a mass-produced aftermarket accessory. Set up the CNC porrgramme and you can run them off by the dozen. There are elements that are over-priced, but equally, elements that are very reasonably priced when you consider the cost of materials, tooling and labour.

I smell a troll. . . .

Waisted, I'm not exactly sure what you're talking about. Unless you're shooting some kind of Silhouette Rifle, there isn't really a SB match rifle out there without a fully-adjustable stock. I'm a lefty and I shoot Left-Handed and honestly, the walnut stock on my Anschutz 1907L is probably the only break I do get.

I'm not going to pretend to know what was (or is) in your heart or your mind when you made your post. We all have had bad days at the shooting range of life from time to time. The people that come on Target Talk share their insights with fellow shooters, be they from across the county, or across the continent.

A lot of us are really puzzled by your post. If you have a real match rifle with a stock that isn't adjustable, or there's some kind of defective or broken part or mechanism, there are ways to remedy that fairly easily. A good number of us are knowledgable to help you out with that. If that's not the case, then we can just chalk it up to a bad day at the range and leave it be.

If you want something that is completly adjustable I would suggest a RMFTC an English made stock for 19 series Anschulz barreled actions

http://www.rmftc.eu/index.htm

Happy shooting

Jason wrote:I smell a troll. . . .

So do I, and it stinks badly.

I have a Win 52D, similar to what I shot in college over 25 years ago. It does not have any adjustments on the stock. It still shoots well. So I acquired a An1913. Many adjustments possible, but probably the trigger is the biggest improvement. Shooting these two is like the differences in shooting my AR15 service rifle vs. my T2K in hipower. The style and the rules were different back then.

I have a project biathlon/squirrel rifle I've been working on for about 6 months now. And have made a few parts for it from aluminum. I am a novice machinist only by the fact that I had to make a trigger guard for this project. That took forever... well over a weeks worth of work to get it right. Because I had the time, I made a buttplate also. It took me two days. I think the prices for gear are reasonable to the effort involved in producing these precision pieces.

Bill Earnst has very reasonable prices on the pieces he produces, I've actually told him he doesn't charge enough. Here are some pics of the buttplate:







It'll take me another day of work to make it 4 way adjustable if I need to.

I would have gladly paid someone 200 to 300 bucks to make me a trigger guard. The person complaining about price needs to make a few parts and see the effort involved.

Sean

Sean,

Your metalwork is down right great! I can really see the workmanship in the piece. If you get mored with your day job, you might have a future in this.

OK guys, mea culpa, and you're right (apart from Jason and Jose, of course :) although I do apologise for upsetting some good folks on this board). I of course know about those fabulous rifles made for competitions which cost an arm, both legs and the blood of your firstborn, but which do the job.

But I do not know about the cheap alternatives. I'm not talking about cheap rifles - I'm talking about cheap accessories. Someone said that any manufacturers who produce cheap stuff don't last because the stuff is just cheap c**p, and no one buys it. The point being that it takes lots of work to get it right, and if it's cheap, the work has not been done.

That may be true, but please bear with me while I try to defend my position.

I'm a newbie (not a troll) and I just do not know much at this stage. I particularly do not know if I should, want or need to fork out $3000 on a target rifle right now. I have just forked out $600 on a Savage-Anschutz Match 64 built in 1966, complete with pretty nice upgraded Anschutz aperture sights, and I'm looking at fitting this rifle to my frame, which it seriously does not at the moment.

But I'm just not sure about spending the hundreds which are currently required to install a butt extension with hook, palm rest and sight risers. The comb adjustment is not possible at all in this rifle without discarding the current stock, and you know what a new stock will cost. So that's one crucial adjustment which I just cannot make without some serious blood-letting.

What I'd REALLY like to do is to fit some cheap junk to the thing, eg. stock extensions for adjusting pull length, simple 11mm sight risers to get my head up, a stupid lump of anything to support the fore end on my hand, and so on. This stuff doesn't need to be quality, it just needs to make the damn rifle fit me better than at present.

Then, maybe I can see if I actually CAN shoot offhand at 50M with any success. Because at this point, I just do not know. And if I shell out the currently required malookah to test the waters, and find that this is not working for me, I've wasted time and money. The time, I don't mind, but…

And I'm sure there are many other noobs around, facing exactly the same problem. If they had access to cheap kit which might help them to get more into the sport, and maybe to help them choose which discipline suits them best, we might have more people involved in this sport.

Of course, as noobs improve, we will start to question the quality of our kit (hell, it's the first thing any shooter does, right?) and so the sales of the top end gear will absolutely not suffer. Unless, heaven forbid, that top end stuff isn't needed in the first place… (well, of course, it is, but maybe not by many people).

You can make your own palm block from a piece of wood and a toilet bolt; stock extensions can be easily cut from 1/4" hardboard and even sanded with a taper to get some cast off); build up the cheek piece with pieces of old target held on with duct tape.

Also, here's a contact for some reasonably priced fully adjustable buttplates: http://www.masterclassstocks.com/accessories.html

Pat McCoy wrote:You can make your own palm block from a piece of wood and a toilet bolt; stock extensions can be easily cut from 1/4" hardboard and even sanded with a taper to get some cast off); build up the cheek piece with pieces of old target held on with duct tape.

Also, here's a contact for some reasonably priced fully adjustable buttplates: http://www.masterclassstocks.com/accessories.html

Thanks! Interesting that you should suggest home-made stuff.

I have a new-to-me 22LR target rifle (my first firearm - eek!) and I've been wanting to see how accurate it is, which means removing ME as much as possible from the system. So I started with the acquisition of a fore-end rest so that I could stabilise the thing as much as possible, eliminating one major variable (but not all the others of course - one step at a time, right?).

So I now have a fore-end rest which, on examination, is constructed as follows: the fore-end of the rifle stock rests on a bed of closely packed cellular material, easily compressed but which will always spring back to its original shape, and this is coated with a polymer sheath which guarantees that the stock will not acquire any scuff marks during shooting. This bed is mounted on, and supported by, a stock channel, made of densely packed compressed fibre for a consistent interface to the rifle, shaped to precisely fit the stock with just enough room for the bed.

Below that, there are two support structures, each set on either side of the barrel centreline, made of an arrangement of elongated cellular strands laid in parallel, with the axis of the elongation placed in the vertical axis, to provide good support with almost no "give" in the vertical plane.

This structure is then mounted on a base made of another arrangement of elongated cellular parallel strands, this time lying parallel to the bench, to minimise the transfer of any external shock from the bench to the rifle. This base extends beyond the limits of the matching vertical supports, for added stability.

Sounds really good. I made it myself, for a cost of $2. The literary description I have provided is free. Maybe I can get a job as a retail copywriter? Certainly not as an accessories manufacturer…