The author fired this three-shot group at 100 yards. It measures .15 inch center to center, considerably better than the builder's half-minute accuracy guarentee.

The body of the Model 52 bolt is .700 inch in diameter, and it has a Sako-style extractor up front. Three panels of 24 line-per-inch checkering adorn the knob of its bolt handle. The bolt face is recessed, although the counterbore wall is interrupted by a slot for the extractor and second thinner slot for passage of the ejector. The use of three locking lugs reduces bolt rotation to about 60 degrees, compared to 90 degrees for the typical two-lug bolt.

A problem often faced by production people during the machining of turn-bolt actions is uneven contact between the locking lugs and their seats in the receiver. It is quite common to see only partial seating of one lug of a two-lug system, with the second lug left hanging in midair with little to no contact; adding a third lug further complicates the manufacturing process.

To check locking lug bearing surface area contact of the Model 52, I coated the lugs with Dykem layout dye and then fired 20 rounds in the rifle. I was not surprised to see close to 100 percent contact of all three lugs.

The bolt release at the left-hand side of the receiver bridge is smaller and therefore less obtrusive than the one on the Model 22, an improvement in my book. When the firing pin is cocked, a metal tab replete with red dot protrudes into view from beneath the rear of the bolt shroud.

The recoil lug of the Model 52 is a washer-type held captive between the barrel shank and the face of the receiver, same as on the Remington Model 700 action. The action is closely bedded in the stock with the bottom of the receiver ring and about 11⁄2 inches of the barrel just forward of the receiver resting on pads of synthetic bedding material.

The 52 has an excellent, fully adjustable trigger design, and while weight of pull can be adjusted down to 16 ounces, Cooper recommends it be done only by a qualified gunsmith. The trigger on my Model 52 breaks crisply at three pounds with no detectable creep or overtravel and a pull-to-pull weight variation of less than two ounces.

Checkering is 22 lines per inch, hand cut with a borderless pattern. The fore-end is set off with an ebony tip.

The two-position safety located beside the tang blocks the trigger only, and since it does not lock bolt rotation, a round can be removed from the chamber while the safety is engaged. The safety works fine, but I'd really like to see it replaced by a Model 70-style three-position safety located on the bolt shroud.

At first glance the Model 52 appears to have a hinged floorplate, but closer examination reveals a single-column detachable magazine with a release that has the appearance of a floorplate hinge. The body and follower of the magazine are stainless steel, but everything else is carbon steel.

The one-piece trigger guard/ magazine housing is an absolute marvel of precision machining, and that--along with its shape plus the fact that the magazine floorplate fits flush with the bottom metal--makes it the only truly attractive detachable magazine system I have ever examined.