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So let's go back and review the entire thread and all the statements made therein. I think it was my initial comment designed to (successfully) instigate a riot that claimed CRF was marketing hype and even a Remmy 700 push feed will cycle upside down. Nobody EVER claimed a Remmy 700 was the best. The 700 took arguably the world's best design, the M98 Mauser and bastardized it to be modular, cost effective, and mass production friendly. At it's best, the 700 is an ingenious and reliable platform that works extremely well, one that offends the senses of the M98 purists, and the 700 is far too often plagued with build issues on the assembly line. The M98 itself is not without faults either though, and some of these are directly inherent in its design. It weakens one of the locking lugs by machining a slot through the middle of it for the ejector, and the gas handling capabilities from a ruptured primer are well short of perfect.

I have seen limited DG hunting, but I equipped myself with a double as my primary firearm, backup rifle being a Sako push feed in .375.... I am comfortable with the Sako and the caliber was a hedge on lost ammo courtesy of the airline.

Some context: professionally I am an IT guy specializing in infrastructure in general and networking in particular associated with the very large global banks and their high availability systems, an environment that is intolerant of outages or service interruption of any kind. What we know is that the basic question is not "if" hardware will fail, but "when" it will fail, so we design around this with diversity and redundancy. Another irrefutable given is that software is always buggy and as a general rule becomes more stable over time as fixes are applied.

Why the context? Well, the parallel is that the double rifle is the highly available fully diverse and redundant hardware and of course the hunter is the software. The bolt rifle is not a high av system but can be made very well indeed, whether it be push feed or CRF, of it can be made very poorly in either format. The software again, is the hunter. I can short stroke a push feed, and I can stove pipe a CRF if I am buggy. I can use either to great effect if I do my part.

The key here is to do your part and use a well maintained, tried and true rifle. That could be a properly built model 700. Make sure you don't let the circlip extractor clog up with rust and crud over many years of neglect, and it will serve you well, because as offensive as that design is to the Mauser 98 purist, it is pure evil genius and incredibly strong, reliable and effective. On the flip side, make sure your CRF extractor claw is also properly built, correctly tuned and timed, and well maintained, and not to forget, operate it properly, lest it bugger up into a colossal jam as well.

We can't fix stupid. If the software is really buggy, one can't hope to see either form of bolt rifle be dependable. In good hands, a well executed rifle of any M98 persuasion in either push feed or CRF format is a truly remarkable rifle. Surely from a pedigree perspective, the M98 is a peerless design in all of its many renditions and to me that includes a well executed push feed.

To say that a CRF is the only way, is at least to me, still driven by marketers wanting a new gimmick to push rifles out the door. I'd rather have in my hands a well executed push feed than a poorly done CRF any day of the week. I will not short stroke mine no matter how high the stress level. I've learned how to operate it properly.

Of note, I've not played with these relatively new generation Winchesters to pass judgement on them, however, back in the 70s when I was most close to them, they as I recall were of typical assembly line build, fit, and finish. Nothing to get excited about in the quality or accuracy dept, and they were at the time push feed. My uneducated thought is that Winchesters are still of average mediocre build quality and accuracy, but now they come with CRF, and according to the marketing hype, we should toss all of our push feeds and rush out and buy one of them lest we lose our life over it...... Really?

Winchester made a bunch of CRF noise, and it wasn't long before a bunch of other companies jumped on that bandwagon. "Heaven help us if we lose market share". OMG, a fate worse than death if we too don't come out with our own CRF..... Let's capitalize on the notion that folks will die if they don't have CRF...... Again, REALLY??

Edited by Postman (17/09/16 12:50 AM)

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