Benchrest Books

If you ever see a copy of this book for sale, snap it up. If you're a BR kind of shooter you can't go wrong. If you're a BR kind of shooter you probably already know that.

Stuart Otteson's Benchrest Actions and Triggers is truly a lost classic. Although the state-of-the-art has advanced substantially in the last 20 years, any action designer will tell you flat out that BAaT has influenced the design of every important modern benchrest action, just as Otteson't The Bolt Action has been the bible for the folks actually involved in designing the the less exotic actions which have appeared since that book's first first printing in 1976. Benchrest Actions and Triggers is a compilation of 17 articles Mr. Otteson wrote. The articles contained are of particular interest to the benchrest crowd -- a very technical and demanding bunch.

To follow up on the advice in the title line, if you're fortunate to own a copy be very careful who you loan it to. Shooters are great folks, but there are limits to temptation. If you don't want your best friend shuffling his feet and saying "um, I don't know *where* I could have left it", just protect your friendship by not loaning it to him in the first place. Let him read it where you can keep an eye on him.

Oh -- Stuart's name is "Otteson", not "Ottenson". Some clerk made a typo years ago, possibly in preparing or filing the ISBN paperwork and this mistake appears everywhere -- not all the time, but often enough to make searching for this book, which is almost impossible to find anyway, even more difficult.

A couple of good articles on primer testing but otherwise this book was almost devoid of any data. It was just a few guys sitting around talking. I regret buying it.

This book covers the best articles from Precision Shooting magazine that are written by professional and experienced shooters from across the country. This is an excellent collaboration of articles ranging from doping the wind to neck sizes, ballistics, benchrest and highpower shooting techniques and so on and so on and so on. Like my title says this is a definite MUST for any serious shooter or those who want to get serious!

Very informative. Great articles on benchrest that apply also to general rifle accuracy.

In response to Mr. Lynch's extraordinarily negative review, I don't believe he read more than an article or two in the whole book (which has hundreds of articles.) What one should know before buying this book is that it isn't a book per se, it's a reprint of select articles previously published in the magazine Precision Shooting between August 1982 and May 1996. These articles are printed chronologically in the book so they aren't organized by subject, which makes it a bit choppy sometimes. There is a huge amount of instruction and boatloads of data, things seemingly (unless you're into benchrest) inane such as hardness of Norma 6 PPC cases to variations in the rate of barrell twist, milimeter by milimeter. When you see these articles you'll know why Mr. Lynch's claim of no data is so far off.