It’s a common question from customers. We have aluminum stocks, bedding blocks, pillars, and so on now so why bed a stock?
Well it’s really quite simple. With all common action designs a recoil lug is used to transfer the energy/reward motion of the action to your stock.
Unless the stock is precision made to match the exact location of the recoil lug, your lug will actually have space behind it preventing it from properly contacting the stock on the back side of the lug. If the lug does not properly contact the stock your action screws actually become what carries the load of the recoil and transfers the energy/motion to the stock.
Factory actions are mass produced and will have manufacturing tolerances in over all length which will change recoil lug location. Even custom actions will see some variation in overall length.
This problem becomes even more compounded when we true actions. Part of truing the action is removing metal from the face which changes the location of the recoil lug.
You can often times remove a well used non bedded action from a stock and easily see where there are rub/polish marks from action movement. It doesn’t take much to impact accuracy.
Bedding is a relatively inexpensive part of building a custom gun. It’s the final step to guarantee consistency. It’s doesn’t do any good at all to invest in the best parts, all the rest of the work, then skip a step to save a couple c notes.
Without bedding I can promise your firearm is not going to shoot to it’s full potential.
In a extreme case, failure to have proper recoil lug contact could result in stock or action screw failure.
In fact, BCG will not guarantee any accuracy without bedding of a stock.
(In this article we are just addressing the primary issue when you do not bed a stock…there are more pluses to bedding than what is listed)
