Concerned about my Ruger number 1 rifle and it’s lack of consistency in hitting the target where I am trying to make it hit, I put a thread out on my favorite outdoors forum, Utah Wildlife Network.  Check them out sometime.

Anyway, it didn’t take long for one of the older members of the forum to come back with the fact that the forearm mounting screw just might be too tight.  I don’t know these pork gun issues as well as perhaps I should and so I went on line to see if I could find anything out there to support this guys claim as one of my rifles possible  issues.

What I found was that a whole bunch of Ruger No. 1 owners have experienced the same thing as I have and that the mounting screw seems to hold the key to making them more accurate.  More pressure means some tension against the barrel, which when fired, causes the movement of the barrel to be inconsistent…harmonics it’s called.

I kept digging and found an article printed in 1977 in Rifle Magazine.

http://www.riflemagazine.com/magazine/PDF/ri51partial.pdf

It was around that date that Sherry picked up my Ruger rifle and so to have an article written at that time explaining the issue makes a lot of sense.  The Ruger No. 1 rifle was like the coming out of an old rifle action, the falling block, and putting it on a new fangled stock and in modern calibers.  I fell in love with the lo0ks of the rifle and the fact that it was a single shot rifle made it even more intriguing, since I’m very big on saving bullets and making that one shot count.

So too for others who bought the rifles in various calibers and I’m sure some of them have never fired their guns, they just bought them to say they have them and to show them off to their buddies.  But for those of us who bought them to use them, we quickly found that although they could produce some tight sighting in patterns, the consistency in those groupings  from year to year was lacking.

I worked with a fellow who also bought a Ruger No. 1 in 308 caliber about the same time as I got mine and his comments were that his first shot fired at the range would go wherever it wanted to go and then after that the bullets would begin to pattern.  Mine is the same way and so I don’t clean it if I am planning on using it within a month or so.  Did Soda Grizz learn this the hard way too and that is the reason he doesn’t ever clean any of his guns?

Bears Butt

August 4, 2013