Savage 12LRP 243 - 26" Barrel, Synthetic, Fixed Stock

Excellent rifle. Fantastic trigger and extremely accurate. Shoots 70,87, and 105 grain ammo all 1/2 MOA. One of my favorite rifles i have ever owned.

This rifle is hard to rate but my final verdict is that it was a bit of a disappointment. I could not get the performance from it as I had achieved in the 6.5 mm version. I continually tweaked reloads for about 6 months and then gave up and moved on to another Creedmore. I managed to get 1 MOA performance from the rifle. I always thought that it had the potential to be better even though I could not achieve it. My other Savage's are great. I had to replace the extractor mechanism which failed. However Savage's customer service was superb in helping me fix the problem. I am an experienced reloader and found that three different types of brass all had primer 'looseness' after a couple of reloads. I initially blamed the brass but after Winchester, Nosler and Hornady all had the same problem I became baffled. I have never experienced this problem with any of my various other calibers. I ended up being unable to live with the rifle.

It is really hard to review this gun! Good things but also some not so good. The heavy bull barrel, the tight headspace, the stock and the bedding are very good in this gun. And the gun is indeed very accurate. Up to about 350-400 yards. Beyond that though, you are limited on bullet choice. Long range accuracy with the 243 requires the use of bullets with high BC. These are longer bullets requiring a barrel with faster rate of twist. This gun has a 1:9.25 rate of twist. Not enough to stabilize longer bullets. I knew that before buying this gun, with an intention of replacing the barrel with a shilen or mcgowen barrel 1:7 or 1:8 twist rate. Definitely, this is not a "long range precision" gun. I basically bought this gun for the target action, the stock, and the savage design that allows easy barrel swap If the barrel twist rate was the only problem, I would have given this gun a 5 star rating. But there are other problems. First major problem with this gun is the trigger. Very light and crisp trigger (10 oz), but locks on you frequently. No matter how smoothly you operate the bolt. And this bolt in not smooth to start with. I ended up setting the trigger to about 2 lbs to avoid the frequent locking. This "target accutrigger" is basically worthless. I have seen much better factory triggers on cheaper guns. I would get the CZ factory set trigger any time of the day. Anyway, you can always get a better aftermarket trigger for the savage action. What is definitely the worst problem with this gun is the bolt. And that, you can't replace that easy. This is a very cheap bolt design with a rough downward cocking movement and a very sloppy backward movement. Definitely not the bolt quality you find in similarly priced guns. Also, not enough steel on this bolt. The magazine on this gun is solid but it is hard to load to capacity without using both hands. Loading this magazine to capacity also creates feeding problems. The bolt design doesn't help much either. Overall, this is an OK gun with options to upgrade.