Brent: there are a couple of things you can do.... First, remove the forestock and make certain that the rear part of the forestock that mates to the action is 'squared'. That is, there is no part of it that butts against the action while the rest does not. We're not talking about a lot of wood there, as it is just a small part of the rear of the forestock but, if one end butts against the action and the other doesn't, the pressure upon the barrel will throw your shots.
The second thing you can do is to relieve the metal and plastic spacers found at the front of the forestock in the barrel channel. In essense you are trying to free-float the barrel. Sometimes you will see that the metal endpiece or end cap, and that white plastic spacer impact directly on the barrel and that will throw your group off. Relieve those parts so the barrel floats free and that will help. Also, with the forestock, you may wish to use a thin lock washer to tighten the forestock to the barrel but not put any tension on the barrel so as to impact your groups when the barrel heats up.
I've worked on a couple of those rifles and those two efforts seem to help significantly. Also, with ammo, we found that the 180 gn loads shot best from the ones we worked on. We got some fantastic groups with the Nosler Ballistic tips but they performed poorly on whitetail. We got great groups with a number of different powder and bullet combinations but the one that seemed to work best overall was the plain jane Reminton 180 gn round nose soft point - groups 3 within a inch at 100 yds.
Try those two tricks and see if that helps with your groups. HTH. Mikey.
