Post by goomba on Jun 10, 2009 17:57:33 GMT -5
Looking Back at The Scout Rifle
Rodriguez asks, "Is the ultimate Jack-of-All-Trades still a viable concept?"
By Greg Rodriguez Posted: 05-28-09
There was a time when the late Jeff Cooper's scout rifle idea was as hot as piercing your nether regions is today. Its popularity peaked when Steyr introduced its Scout Rifle, which was designed with input from Colonel Cooper. Savage, Ruger, and custom gunsmiths like Lew Bonitz and Jim Brockman followed with scout-type rifles of their own, but the concept never caught on as much as Cooper would have liked. That's too bad, because the scout configuration makes for a handy little rifle.
For those not familiar with the concept, the scout rifle is essentially a lightweight, general-purpose rifle capable of handling just about any defensive or hunting situation. According to Cooper, a scout rifle should be chambered for a cartridge of sufficient power to cleanly take game up to 500 pounds and with a flat enough trajectory to make hits as far as the operator is comfortable shooting. In short, Colonel Cooper sought a versatile, handy rifle that was user-friendly—or, as he told me a year before his passing, "a rifle that is on your side."
The scout concept was further refined over the years at Cooper's Gunsite Academy. And at the First Scout Rifle Conference held at Gunsite in 1983, Colonel Cooper and the rest of the Ekeiboloi Society settled on the criteria for a scout rifle: three kilogram maximum weight, one meter maximum length, a forward-mounted telescope, and chambered in .308 Winchester. For those who don't read metric, a scout rifle will have a thin barrel of 20-21 inches, an overall length of less than 39 inches, and a finished weight somewhere south of seven pounds. A true scout rifle is a compact, fast-handling package: a pleasure to tote afield.
I've toyed with various custom and factory scout rifles since I first read about the concept in my misspent youth. I built two rifles on military surplus Mauser actions that I dropped into synthetic stocks. Ghost ring sights and a Leupold extended eye relief scope mounted on XS Sight's scout mount provided the rugged, foolproof sighting system my utility rifles required.
Those rifles served me well, but they were crude—a fact that was all-too-apparent after I threw the first real Scout Rifle, the then-new Steyr Scout, to my shoulder. I was so impressed, I sold my jerry-rigged Mausers and acquired two scouts: a Steyr, and a custom number built on a Model 70 by Jim Brockman, to satisfy my itch for the ultimate jack-of-all-trades.
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