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It wasn’t evenly applied here: The left side showed solid contact with the barrel while on the right only a thin ridge of epoxy appeared to be in contact. There’s epoxy bedding around both action screws and in the front portion of the recoil lug mortise, the last place the barrel touches the stock. The fore-end has X-shaped cross-braces to provide rigidity. It’s worth noting that the action screws are treated to a thread-locking compound, so expect them to be a bit stiff when you go to remove the barreled action for the first time. The barreled action is free-floated in the stock. The stock has sling swivel studs front and back. The fore-end has similar stippling on the bottom, and there’s a relieved channel just under the barrel for your fingers to hang onto. I’m a big fan of palm swells on hunting stocks, and this one feels great. The stock is slim and trim, and the wrist features a stippled pattern for a non-slip grip as well as a subtle palm swell for right-handed shooters. As everyone who’s shot stout-recoiling guns can probably attest, it’s the jolt to the cheek-often more so than the shove to the shoulder-that creates a lot of the discomfort. Its geometry and internal structure act to pull the comb away from your cheek as it crushes under recoil. In the case of Browning’s Inflex pad, there’s a little more at work. It can be easy to gloss over recoil pads, simply saying they do (or don’t do) a good job of reducing recoil. Plus, I like a stock that looks good, and this one does. I’m not the type who goes all crazy worrying about how my rifle might appear to a critter a couple hundred yards away, but I do think camo stocks are a wise choice for big game hunting-as opposed to black or shiny wood. Instead it employs what A-TACS calls “organic pixels” to create small and large shapes that are subtle but still effective at distance.
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A-TACS is a Georgia company that produces a number of patterns used by several companies, and AU stands for Arid Urban, the name of the pattern.ĪU is a hybrid pattern-neither composed of pixilated digital shapes, nor the old-school “blob” type camo. I’ll help you out on the alphabet soup here. Sticking with the stock, it is a composite and finished in A-TACS AU camo. It’s a simple, sturdy and effective arrangement, producing a rifle that still weighs only about 7.5 pounds and sells for a little over a grand. It’s probably best described as a sleeve that fits on top of the comb, and by means of four half-inch screws with washers, the sleeve can be raised or lowered to one of five positions. However, most adjustable combs add weight and significant cost. But unlike other designs, it adds almost no weight and doesn’t increase cost significantly. A big selling point for Rupp is the stock, which has an adjustable comb. Adjustable combs allow shooters to achieve a proper head position in order to look through the center of a scope, thereby reducing aiming errors, which are magnified greatly at longer ranges. Adjustable combs are nothing new, not in this day and age when many hunters want to shoot farther.
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The other reason is the Western Hunter’s stock. This is one reason why I thought it merited coverage in RifleShooter. However, each year some of these SHOT Show specials make it into the regular-production catalog, and the Western Hunter is a strong candidate to do exactly that. Browning does things a little differently from other gun companies, and the Western Hunter is what the company calls a “SHOT Show special.” This means it’s a limited-production model. The X-Bolt Western Hunter kinda falls in the middle, a workhorse rifle with just the right frills for certain types of hunters.
#Huntr vs western series
The X-Bolt has been Browning’s flagship bolt-action centerfire for more than a dozen years now, and in that time it has been produced in a dizzying array of variants-from relatively plain Jane synthetic-stocked models to classy, high-grade wood models to the feature-packed Hell’s Canyon series to rifles specifically built for long range.