How does rifle bedding affect accuracy?

By bedding a rifle's action, you take all play out of the equation. You are essentially custom fitting the stock of the rifle to the action, giving it a full, firm foundation to sit in. There's is virtually no movement at all of the action within the stock with a proper bedding. Combine this with a free floated barrel, custom or accurised trigger and proper scope, you've got a superlative rifle.

Bedding A Rifle

Glass Bedding A Rifle

There are a few things that glass bedding will do to improve a rifle.

First it ensures a snug fit between the reciever/barrel and the stock. If a receiver has any play in the stock and can jump around from shot to shot it will cause inconsistent vibrations that will affect accuracy in a bad way.

Secondly it helps reduce the chances that a wooden stock will warp in a humid environment and change pressure points on the receiver/barrel which could make it shoot differently throughout the year.

Lastly it allows you to pillar bed the reciever and free float the barrel. By doing this you remove all sources of inconsistent vibrations. You will rarely find a match grade long range custom rifle that has not been glass bedded.

I have glass bedded several rifles and floated the barrels on every one. Combined with handloading for each rifle I have been able to shrink shot groups from 1-2 inches down to 1/2 inch or less.

If your good with tools and brave enough to try it a good quality glass bedding kit only costs $30, other wise your going to spend around $75 to have a gunsmtih do this for you. In either case it is a nice improvement for most rifles.

For a lot of hunting rifles, it won't make much difference. But I have a few that had enough play in the stock, even with the bedding screws properly tightened, that they'd shift enough to give contact between the barrel and one side of the stock's fore-end.

Simple as I a can make it:

Bedding has nothing to do with the fit of the scope to the reciever.

It has a lot to do with the dynamics that occur when the rifle is fired.

Solid bedding of the action, (and 'floating' the barrel), guarantee that

the vibrations that occur in the barrel/action structure at the shot

are as uniform, (shot to shot with the same load), as we can make them.

This can affect point of impact enough to be noticed in Target or bench-rest competition.

The casual shooter would be unlikely to notice.

Years ago falling for the glass bedding kick going on at the time. I glass bedded a 110 in 06. The rifle shot a 1" group with 150 gr.Rem.corlokt which I always used before I started to hand load. The work in glass bedding wasn't worth the effort for nothing changed. It was still accurate to the 1". I moved on to the 308 and sold it to a friend and to my delight would bragg about the very accurate gun I had sold him. He liked to tell shooting the head off a turkey at 100 yds. at a turkey shoot in Pennsylvania,and I loved his teasing. Hope you didn't mind my digress

Consistant contact.

Lighter barrels need some consistant pressure to keep zero.

I shoot heavy barrels most of the time so I free float. Hot barrel doesn't make any changes in my zero. Your barrel flexs and moves. Try firing 10 shots one after another on a hot day from a bench through a hunter barrel. The zero will start to wander.

This is bedding barrels. Now bedding actions just creates a stiffer stable area for the action to sit in.