I have never owned a rifle that shot better with a pressure bedded barrel and the same experience is true for the Gun Club President. He also beds and experiments with his rifles.
I went through bedding two M700 Remington's. One in 6.5 Swede and another in 30-06.
I conducted load development for M700 classic in 6.5 Swede and found the thing was not necessarily a tack driver. At 100 yards it did shoot under 2”, which I consider perfectly acceptable for deer hunting. If the rifle shoots 2 MOA, then it will hit within four inches at 200 yards, six inches at 300 yards. That is plenty good, considering that I don’t hold much better with a lightweight rifle off the bench.
The 6.5 Swede action was in a wooden stock. For this rifle, and someone else confirmed their rifle was similar, Remington created a raised area in the barrel channel which created a pressure point. I like free floated barrels. When a barrel heats up it will expand. If there is a pressure point, or a bearing point on the barrel, as the barrel expands, the pressure against the barrel changes. This will cause a change in a point of impact.
So with stock channel tools, I scraped the barrel channel, removing the pressure point, and created a clearance so the barrel no longer touched the left side of the barrel channel. I suspect the left side of the barrel touching the stock created a lot of side to side movements. But not all. If the recoil lug is free to slide around in the stock, the action will shift during recoil.
I “pillar” bedded creating columns of Bisonite, and then I routed a humongous amount of wood forward of the magazine recess, and filled that with Bisonite. The final bedding looks awful, with voids, and it is not completely filled out around the recoil lug recess. But I was tired and grumpy and wanted to shoot my rifle, so I put it back together and took it to the range.
Anyway, just bedding and free floating the barrel of this rifle changed its group size considerably. These lightweight rifles are hard to shoot, they are twitchy, they kick hard, and they are very sensitive to stock weld and shooting position. Still, this rifle might shoot under 1 MOA, which is excellent for a deer rifle.
I have couple of "before glassbedding" targets. Everything is at 100 yards. If you notice the wide horizontal dispersion with 140 SMK’s. Sierra match bullets are in a word, superb. In a match barrel they will shoot bug hole groups. This side to side movement indicated to me that something was wrong with the bedding. The action, or the barrel was moving left and right in the stock.
In my opinion it shot much better. These targets were fired fast, about five shots under a minute, maybe two. I racked the bolt and shot if the crosshairs looked good. The barrel was hot enough to be uncomfortable to touch.
This improvement so encouraged me, that I bought a new stock for my other M700. It is a 30-06 in a Remington "tupperware" stock. I am going to put it in a laminated stock, and I am going to pillar that. I hope that I can get it to shoot under MOA.The 30-06 was removed from its factory plastic stock and bedded in a laminated stock. I believe laminated stocks are very stiff.
The 30-06, I did not shoot enough pre bedding targets, but this is one.
This is a post bedding target.
This is not quite an apples to apples comparison, the first target was fired using 174 FMJ and surplus 4895, and the second was 175 SMK’s and 4350. And the groups are not tiny clusters, but I do believe the post bedded rifle is more accurate. I am quite impressed that the factory hunting barrels on both rifles are capable of MOA grouping. It used to be that only an exceptional factory barrel would shoot MOA.