THE ONE GUN

Can You Use Off-the-Shelf Components to Build a Bolt Gun to Cover all the Bases?

- Iain Harrison

Sometimes, you just have to roll up your sleeves and do things yourself.

If you had to assemble one rifle to cover all your intermediate to long-range needs, what would it be? If you asked this question to 100 gun nuts, you’d probably come away with just as many different answers. But there’d be a few common threads running throughout the discussion. Just like if you posed the conundrum regarding choices for putting together your ultimate AR, there’s no right or wrong answer. It’s entirely situationally dependent, but it’s a great mental exercise and worthy of late-night campfire discussions involving brown liquid and burning plant material.

Living in the desert southwest poses different firearm challenges and needs than you might find in New England, where shots longer than 300 yards are going to be in the minority and the availability of common calibers is a more important factor than wringing out the last bit of advantage when it comes to reduced wind drift. Hunting the Rockies while humping an extra couple of pounds of steel and glass means that you’re going to be breathing out of your asshole with greater vigor than if you’d carried the same rifle to a Midwest deer stand. Like we said, it’s situationally dependent, and your choices might be entirely different than your buddy’s.

Running through a personal decision tree, our one rifle had to check the following boxes:

• The ability to hit multiple, torsosized targets out to the maximum distance they can be observed in our backyard, which realistically is 1,100 yards or thereabouts

• Able to hit the kill-zone on deersized animals out to a self-imposed ethical maximum of 700 yards, which equates to an 8-inch diameter circle and a projectile energy of at least 1,000 ft-lb (though more is definitely better)