Not to mention unless somethings changed if you have a problem that’s not within your abilities they will gladly address it.

I bought an M1A scout in I think 2019, so maybe things changed since then. The rifle as far as function was flawless, I could not have asked for better. It is rock solid reliable. I even played around with a lot of low pressure cast bullet loads, and provided I stayed above a certain level where the bolt locked back, it would cycle and function even flat nosed cast bullets flawlessly. The bad I had with my rifle was accuracy, and the main culprit was the stock fit. I finally decided to send mine to Ted Brown. He did not find anything too wrong with the rifle action. Apparently the barrel was slightly out of time, but it worked fine before, and it still works, so whatever. He screwed and glued the ferrule to the gas block. The big one, and probably 95% of the accuracy gain came from bedding the action to the stock. I do not remember if he added a rear lug or not. The price was not unreasonable, I think it was $500 or $600 at the time for his whole accuracy tune up. The rifle was I think $1100, plus whatever shipping and FFL, call it $1200. I was still less money into it than the Loaded M1A, and almost $1000 less than a Fulton.

Sorry I had to cut that post short. I wanted to say my accuracy was not up to par out of the box. It would sometimes group ok, then randomly shift POI, sometimes 6" at 100 yards. It's not a fault of the rifle action, it was a fault of the stock. I tried a birch stock which was better, but still just mediocre. You could definitely bed your own stock, and likely end up with a good shooting rifle with no more work needed. Some people get lucky, some don't. That's the only bad thing I've found with the M1A's. Now mine will shoot 10 shot groups right about 2" at 100 yards off a bench. Remember that's with peep sights and me shooting, not a great shooter and a scope. Mine loves a 175gr SMK, but just as good has been the plain old Federal 180gr soft point.

In my experience, anytime I've had a wood stocked rifle with a wandering zero or huge groups, it's because of insufficient bedding of the action or at the forend.  My Lee Enfield started out shooting ok, then it went to 14 MOA.  After shimming the stock with brass shims and cardboard (ghetto bedding method), it went down to 3 MOA.  I also had a Mosin Nagant that had a zero that was wandering from one range session to the next.  The shims fixed that issue also.

Absolutely, that was the cause. I wanted to cover all the details on what I had done, but with a 2000 character limit, I can't type too much. Basically I used masking tape as a shim and it helped dramatically. I ended up having Ted Brown work on my rifle, and I feel like if there was anything wrong with the action, he would have found it. At least in my case, the action was fine. I just didn't luck out on a good stock fit. Mine wasn't 14 MOA bad, but it was not good. It would shoot one group maybe 4", then randomly shift dramatically. Sometimes it seemed to spray randomly on paper. I've had smooth bore shotguns that shot slugs better than that. Now it is fantastically accurate, at least on par with a typical AR15.

When I was researching which M1A to go with Bula was the new manufactured rifle I was going to go with.

These new Springfields flat shoot! Mines still 100%, love it!

No sir, my m1a is a factory Springfield scout bought last year. Perfect in every way and 100% function for the first 400 rounds so far!

No problem! It’s factory minus the GI fiberglass stock and red dot

Attached File

To answer the oringal question - no, current M1A's work fine.

I never thought much of the idea of "swapping out of all the parts with USGI!!!.  It's not like you're gonna buy some demilled M14 that's been sitting packed in grease for 40 years.  You're buying various parts from random sources with no idea where they came from and how much use they saw, before they were packed off to Sarco or such and sold.

 Good points. NOS USGI parts are getting hard to find these days and unfortunately worn refinished parts are becoming the norm.

I have some squirrelled back from years ago including stocks, GI barrels, [Winchester and H&R I believe] and a bunch of parts like trigger groups, pistons, and odds and ends.