I've never got around to owning a Savage 110 rifle, but I know they are well made classics. Now Savage has their own straight pull rifle called the Impulse. Using ball bearings for locking lugs. I was skeptical, but ultra-premium rifle maker Heym uses ball bearing lugs on their SR30 rifle and they are as strong or stronger than traditional lugs.

Anyways, this rifle definitely peaks my interest. Wonder if it will do the same for the precision market. No doubt it will end up, at some point and in some configuration, marketed to them.

https://www.savagearms.com/con...=firearms&a=ImpulseS

https://www.youtube.com/user/SavageAccuracy/videos

why have a traditional bolt shape for a straight pull rifle?

Bolt or bolt handle?

If bolt, I can't imagine a simpler design. Less complex than the Lee Navy, and probably easier to produce and more robust than Blaser actions that ride on rails (though Blaser's lock up is obviously fine).

Bolt handle? I guess they could have made it look like the Lee Navy. I think the way it is looks fine. Probably would function fine. Looks like the knob may be removable. And will likely provide opportunity to after market makers to come up with replacements.

I dig it.

Straight pull rifles are fun, and quick. Great for things like culling a pack of hogs or coyotes.

I've owned several milsurp straight pulls, but I'd like to try a modern one out. This is probably even faster and slicker, since the bolt isn't having to translate the rearward motion into bolt body rotation using cams and friction, like on all the straight pulls with traditional locking lugs.

I can see a couple of advantages to the bolt handle design.

Being angled down, there is less hand movement up to grasp and operate it and then back down to the firing position.

But if moved to the left side for a right-handed shooter, it would mimic something I saw a few PRS shooters doing: a right-handed shooter firing a left-handed rifle from the right shoulder. If the rifle is supported by a bipod, the bolt is operated without moving one’s firing hand, and possibly without moving the other hand from the bolt handle. This straight pull design might make that easier without a lot of practice because there would be no rotating the bolt handle up and down with one’s nondominant hand.

Intriguing.

quote:

Originally posted by hrcjon:
why have a traditional bolt shape for a straight pull rifle?

The design works by the bolt handle rotating, so it can't be a straight knob. You can see it in the "CGI" part of the video.

Plus I suppose it's more "familiar" to the general rifle buying public.

If it needs to rotate its not straight pull. I don't care one way or the other. But in the video it doesn't look like they have to move it up.

Well, it's straight pull to the same extent every other straight pull rifle on the market is a straight pull. They all require some movement of the handle to unlock the lugs, either by rotation of the bolt head, or in this case, retraction of a mechanism to allow the ball bearings to retract.

My concern with the Savage is that the receiver is aluminum. I suspect (and hopefully) this rifle has a very long barrel extension and that the bolt slides into that quite a ways so that the lock up is steel on steel. I wouldn't want those bearing locking into a groove milled into the inside of an aluminum receiver. It's hard to tell from Savage's motion schematic. (edit: playing at 1/4 speed helps and it does look like the barrel has a long extension into the reciver and the bolt slides into that.)



As interesting as it is, the bolt design appears to be clearly inspired by the Heym SR30 design. The use of ball bearings in and of itself isn't innovative.

Here's another video Savage just released and the mechanism outside the stock is visible. Very interesting design. Looks like MAYBE the barrels might be easily interchangeable by the user.

Anticipating restrictions on automatics?

I don’t know if it’s just a selective perception because of my own interest in precision rifle shooting or it’s real, but it seems to me that overall the interest has increased in recent times. If that’s true, it could be due to many factors from the increased information about military sniping to the proliferation of YouTube videos about the many aspects of the sport.

More and more companies have been offering new rifles, scopes, and countless accessories designed to appeal to the long distance shooter, and I suspect this Savage is part of that movement.

But I also believe that part of the interest in somewhat less-traditional bolt action rifles is indeed driven by concerns about the inevitable future restrictions on gun rights and which may affect far more than most of us imagine. More than once I’ve made purchasing decisions for that reason, and although some have turned out to have been unnecessary (in the short term), others have been wise.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: sigfreund,

I am really intrigued by this rifle. I always wanted a straight pull but Blasers, Merkels, Heyms, etc, are just so costly. I'd be willing to buy one of these based on what I've seen.



Not sure Savage is the patent holder on the ball bearing lockup, since that system has been out for a long time. It's a strong lockup system. Heym tested theirs to 155,000 psi, which is far in excess of any normal commerical rifle cartridges. Wonder how this lock-up system could evolve into a semi-auto rifle. Maybe it already has at some time, I don't know. I know there are roller locked guns and machine guns.

Very interested, particularly in the LH configurable design. I'm not super pleased with the separate mechanism/button required to retract the bolt with a live round in the chamber, but I guess I could get used to it. Other straight pull designs don't require any additional manual of arms to retract the bolt with a live round in the chamber, to my knowledge.

I don’t, nor have I ever owned, a straight pull rifle but by God I LOVE them. I am amazed I haven’t bought one over the years as I love shooting them.

Looks like this concept is much older that Heym's design. I know the Germans used roller locking machine guns. Korth uses roller locks on some of their pistols.

An interesting video of the principal. A design from 1916?

https://gfycat.com/understated...ology-lindsay-wilson

quote:

Originally posted by Micropterus:
Looks like this concept is much older that Heym's design. I know the Germans used roller locking machine guns. Korth uses roller locks on some of their pistols.

An interesting video of the principal. A design from 1916?

https://gfycat.com/understated...ology-lindsay-wilson

No... That Anschutz-Fortner biathlon rifle action was designed in the 1980s. (They didn't have plastic like that in 1916 anyway.)

I believe it may be the first one utilizing ball bearings like that, since the other well-known examples like the Heym and Blaser are from the 1990s and 2000s. But there may have been some other ball bearing locked actions that predate it.

Roller locking systems, most famously used by HK but utilized in a variety of designs by different manufacturers, are pretty similar. They use a pair of rollers that are pressed out into locking recesses by a wedge, instead of using a number of ball bearings. Not identical, but a very similar concept.

Roller locks predate this ball bearing system by many decades (1940s), and likely served as the inspiration, based on their obvious similarities. The roller lock is itself a further development of the even earlier flapper lock, dating from the very early 1900s.

Roller locked:

quote:

Originally posted by RogueJSK:
No... That Anschutz-Fortner biathlon rifle action was designed in the 1980s. (They didn't have plastic like that in 1916 anyway.)

Well, I knew the working model wasn't from 1916, but I thought that might be a current model of a 1916 patent.

Roller locking actions are old, and this is really just a circular version of that.

"This German invention is used in 95% of rifles in biathlon"


"Peter Fortner, a gunsmith from Rohrdorf, manufacturers so-called repeater devices, which allows athletes to shoot faster by reducing the loading time of their rifles. He says 95% of all professional biathletes use his invention.

The idea came about in the early 1980s. Fortner, a traditional gunsmith, met Peter Angerer, who had won a gold medal in the Olympic Winter Games in Sarajevo. Casually, Angerer told Fortner that West Germany’s biathlon team would need “proper” rifles. Back then, better rifles built in the GDR (former East Germany) at that time were only available on the Soviet and GDR market, Fortner told Quartz. He agreed to rebuild an old biathlon rifle and developed a new repeating device that improves an athlete’s speed. Previous versions had a lateral cocking mechanism. To operate it, shooters needed to take their hands from the pistol grip, so they needed extra time to readjust the rifle. Fortner’s device can be operated by the athlete’s index finger and thumb, without changing the hand position.

“The repeating device alone is about two seconds faster each shot,” Fortner said. He said because the rifle also remains relatively stable, athletes gain a few seconds more they else would use to readjust the rifle.

Here’s a video that shows how the repeating device works: (Ummm, er, sad to say, I don't see a hyper link in that original article. I am all verklempt. but, the photo is cool as a moose.

Fortner formally started his own business in 1984, with a focus on biathlon rifle production. Today he has six employees. The company produces only the repeating device and builds part of the rifles with material received from Fortner’s business partner, Anschütz, a German producer of sports and hunting weapons. "


https://qz.com/54254/this-germ...rifles-in-biathlons/

I'm very interested. Very happy to see Savage on the cutting edge

I'm especially happy to see that they went with a front lock-up as opposed to the rear lock-up.

I'm not worried about the receiver being aluminum. Looks like the bolt locks into the barrel extension for both strength and alignment

quote:

Originally posted by RichardC:
Here’s a video that shows how the repeating device works:

Here