Improving rifle stock design for 500M Fly shoots

[John Weigel]

I acquired a nice little rifle built on Panda F-Class action with the intention of shooting Light Fly competitions in 6mm Dasher. It has a Shehane Tracker II stock, apparently for benchrest purposes with bottom angles that cause upward tracking of aim during recoil. After struggling to develop accuracy with this rifle it twigged that a tendency for vertical stringing on paper might reflect the obvious, so I applied my mediocre efforts to mill down both the fore end and butt contact surfaces of the stock at a new angle that runs parallel to the upper surface of the built-in 20MOA top-of-action picatinny rail. What could possibly go wrong? I chose that angle rather than barrel orientation for reference because it would result in a very slight downward pressure onto bags with recoil movement backwards. Additional ‘meat’ had to be removed to resolve the resulting progressive widening of butt end bag-riding surface (I’m sure that part of the rifle has a name, but I’ve never heard it). The on-paper result of that single change was dramatic, going beyond reducing vertical stringing – see comparative targets attached. This may be interesting to Light Fly shooters using typical light weight benchrest rifle designs, and other overthinkers. Images, top to bottom: Unaltered stock, milled stock demonstrating orientation with top of 20MOA pitched action top x2, 50m target results using unaltered stock attempting to find bullet-seating nodes, and finally, a post-milling target reflecting much better results.

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