M40-66 – Old School Looks, Modern Performance
M40-66 can be equipped with a modern scope to extract maximum performance
Modern high quality custom rifles often come with accuracy guarantees. Spend thousands of dollars on a high quality rifle, built with a synthetic stock from a reputable manufacturer and you may see ½-1MOA accuracy. When a similar effort is made with natural materials, specifically wood stocks, the story changes entirely! Differing densities and the absorption of moisture in the air, and heaven forbid, rain or snow, make it almost impossible to guarantee high levels of precision. We, however, due to our experience and combination of modern and old world techniques, we not only sub ½ MOA guarantee accuracy, but do so with off the shelf factory match ammunition!
"The two factors governing accuracy are harmonics and alignment"
Harmonics can be understood as though the rifle is the same as a tuning fork. Each time the rifle is fired, the vibration through the rifle must be totally consistent, and produce, similar to a tuning fork, the same ‘tone’. As long as there is no play between parts, this can be attained paying close attention to hand fitting of parts, free floating of the barrel, and good bedding techniques and materials. Throw in the variable of a wood stock, and the game changes. That is why you don’t see accuracy guarantees with wood stocked rifles, except us! So we may have had to get a little sneaky to solve this, but we refuse to cut any corners. The original USMC stocks may have been dipped in a vat of motor or, but we believe a more classical appearance is more appealing. The walnut is an elegant grade which we fit and oil finish by hand. With time, and a little TLC, as the wood ages, you can see the patina develop and the grain and warmth of the stock truly springs to life. For those who don’t find that appealing, there’s always plastic stocked rifles with picatinny rails hanging off every corner! They certainly have their place, but nothing has the elegance of an old school classical sniper rifle, especially when it’s capable of putting bullets through the same hole repeatedly!
The alignment of the rifle refers to the mating of all surfaces with each other. Perfect alignment is utterly impossible with mass production. CNC lathes, automated systems, etc. etc just don’t cut it. If you believe the sexy marketing campaigns that modern manufacturing techniques have replaced hand-built craftsmanship, then you may also believe that Hillary Clinton is honest and trustworthy! You just have to do it by hand if you want it perfectly. Pressing a button to automate chambering on a CNC lathe will get you close enough, but if ‘close enough’ isn’t good enough, then you cannot substitute the ‘feel’ of an experienced machinist in the building of a custom rifle. The receiver face, the locking lugs, the bolt face, the recoil lug (both faces), the barrel threading and shoulder, and finally the muzzle crown, all must be machined in perfect parallel to each other and perpendicular to the centerline access of the bore. Did we say ‘perfect’ – we meant absolutely perfect!