Rifles

McMillan has taken its 30 years of experience building tactical rifles for elite military and law enforcement teams and put it into a hunting rifle that not only delivers in the accuracy department, but does so in a rugged and fairly lightweight package—the Tactical Hunter. The essential components that make this successful combination include a G30 action, EDGE ultralight graphite stock, and special attention to key tolerances.

Be it the barrel, exquisite wood or a super-trued action, it's usually apparent when a manufacturer puts extra effort into a certain rifle part to set their product apart from the competition. But the Tactical Hunter doesn't have any singular standout physical feature, instead relying on an overall level of high quality to achieve its distinction.

I've been fortunate to see many types of rifle actions being made on factory assembly lines and in small custom shops around the country, and the keys to accuracy are universally considered concentricity and tight tolerances. Make an action true and make it well, and all of its subordinate parts perform better and you end up with an accurate rifle.

Mass-production has come a long way toward making great actions at reasonable cost, but McMillan's G30 is at a much higher level than you'll find on those. It starts life as a centerless billet blank of 17-4 stainless steel instead of a forging or casting. From there, it is CNC machined for absolute concentricity of the bolt and the action body around an axis defined by the barrel bore line. The action face is trued to be absolutely perpendicular to the axis of the bolt. All of this effort ensures the bullet's path starts as a straight line, and the rifle is merely built around that line.

There simply are no machining marks on the G30 action—not even in the bolt raceways or the underside of the action where I've come to expect them on many rifles. That's not simply McMillan's attention to detail, but also the result of using EDM to cut the bolt raceways. That process removes metal literally at the molecular level leaving the surface absent of any machining artifacts and as smooth as you can get.