Best 223 varmint rifle for the money?

I have owned several (still own a couple) of heavy barreled varmint rifles, but unless I am shooting at prairie dogs, I use a lightweight pencil barreled X-Bolt in 223. It is easier on the shoulder, easier to carry to the next stand and handy in tight corners with the short 22" barrel.

My vote is a Browning X-Bolt Stalker in 223

You cannot beat a Savage for accuracy out of the box and they are starting to get the looks down, so they are not a bad choice either, just not my first choice.
 
Irony

I have a Savage 116 in .270 and, while it's not a varmint, it is phenomenally accurate. The Savage trigger and stock is an absolute winner.
I also have the Remington SPS stainless in .223. It is pretty and very sub MOA accurate. I have a Leupold 4x12x40 on the SPS and I giggle at the accuracy.

Your pick!
 
My Ruger 77mk II light sporter in .223 was half-moa even with the tort liability trigger. Installing a Timney made it easier to get tight groups. No problem with prairie dogs to 300 yards. I guess I've had it maybe a dozen years, now...
 
I have a Remington 700 SPS Varmint that got right about third of MOA at 100 yards out of the box. (Posted pics here a while back.) Then I put a Jewel trigger set at 1 lbs in ... love that rifle!

I have been working out around 200 to 300 yards this summer, now that the ground and water are freezing again, I am going to push out to 600 to 1,000 yards this Winter; and I will see how that goes with this rifle. (Parts of Alaska are much easier to get around in the Winter than the summer.)
 
Here's another vote for the CZ 527 American in .223. Great rifle, great price. The scope is a Weaver 4.5-14x44. I use the CZ on small furry critters and have an AR that I use for predators.The AR can either be in .223, or 6.8SPC depending on the size of the animal I'm hunting. It wears a Leupold 3-9x40 AR.
 
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+ 1 more vote for the CZ 527.

Mine has the Kevlar HS Precision Stock also that came with a factory trigger of 3 lbs 4 oz and a set trigger under 2 lbs with a 1:9 twist. It currently sports a Weaver T-36 scope that I used for hand load development.

CZ527withWeaverT36Scopewebsize.jpg


So far I have found 25 favorite loads that shoot under 0.5 inches with the best 10 loads all under 0.45 inches. The favorite loads were produced with H335 and H4895 powders and bullet weights of 40, 45, 50, 52, 55, 60, 63 and 65 grains in both hunting and match bullet shapes. That accuracy over that wide range of bullet weights is really something, especially considering they were shot with my 68 year old eyes. It shoots factory ammo almost as well but has really come into its own by tuning hand loads.

I just shot its 499th measured group last week and it still shoots just as accurately as it did with its first measured group of 0.218 inches

I highly recommend that barrel / stock combination.
 
A lot has been said about the type rifle. I would like to commit on the cartridge.

Do you intend to use the rifle for varmits only? If you have the possibility of using it on lager game or shoot in the wide open spaces of the planes or from stands along power lines as we did in AR., I would consider a cartridge larger than the 22 centerfires.

If you reload, which is necessary to achieve super accuracy, Then I would look at the my personal favorite the 257 Roberts. I believe Kimber and Ruger chamber rifles in this caliber. With hand loads you can get almost as flat a trajectory as the 243 and 6mm remington. I find that the 257 has less drift than the 243 and 6mm.

Going back to reloading, check my recollection, the 6mm has a little more case volumn than the 243. This allows more versatility when you reload.
The 243 and 6mm are available from most major manufactures.

Good luck
 
The 223 is a fine cartridge for small critters and is a lot of fun to shoot, but ITC is right that a little more horsepower is good if you plan to shoot more than coyotes. My 223 and my 220 Swift do a fine job on coyotes and a decent job on the pigs, but due to losing a couple of pigs I dragged my 260 out of the gunsafe. That's about the same as the 257 Roberts he mentioned, and I've shot pigs and coyotes from 60 yards to 360 yards in the last 2 weeks and not one critter has taken one step past the bullet impact spot. They just bounce. So to repeat a logical statement I read recently, "being undergunned is far worse than being overgunned".
 
Different calibre ?

I see some one has mentioned going up in calibre - .243 ...

I have a 22-250 MOA Vanguard and this gun will give you 20% more velocity
(3800- 4200 fps). BUT this flat shooting laser comes with a price - the recoil "knocks you out of the picture". You will not be able to actually see the hit as your gun jumps to the right. A spotter helps. (Good luck finding one)
Of course you can load it down to 3000fps or even 2000fps.

Enter the Ruger .204, tiny bullets at high speed and from what i have read is that guys love it because of lack of recoil and ability to see hits

More fuel to the fire for you JD
 
I have an older model .223, Tikka 595 that shoots 5/16" groups at 100 yards. Love that rifle! The trigger is fantastic. It's a 1:12 twist, which is perfect for varmint loads. Handloaded 50 grain, V-Max bullets are about the most accurate in my rifle.

If you're going to be shooting varmints in very windy conditions, you may want to move up to 6mm Rem in my 700 BDL Varmint. I'm in Maine and found the caliber better for spring chuck shooting, when the wind always seems to be blowing. I used 85-90 grain bullets and they worked great!

The only thing I didn't like about the Rem Varmint was the weight. It was too darned heavy to lug around the Maine chuck fields all day. I got rid of it and went back to the .22-250 Rem, in a 700 ADL, with mixed results. I loved it when I hit the chucks, but misses in the grass seemed more difficult to spot.
 
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