My first experience with the Ruger Mini-14 was in the late 1970s shortly after the little .223's introduction. Ruger had sent my dad one to try out, and, as a teenage shooter, I was lucky enough to take it out in the desert and knock around with it for a while. We kept that rifle for years and both felt it to be an excellent all-around long gun worthy of knocking around in the brush with.

With its tighter manufacturing tolerances, the new Mini-14 is more accurate than ever.

Neither of us was a bench shooter, so we didn't agonize over minutes of angle and such. We were more concerned about the reliability of the rifle and the fact that you could pop a coyote off-hand pretty much at will at a reasonable distance. The Mini-14 was not designed as a competition-style rifle anyhow. As long as you could hit a coffee can at 50 yards or so, it was a great rifle in my book.

As a result of my experiences with the Mini-14, I never paid much mind to talk of its shortcomings. I figured that those complaining about the Mini's lack of accuracy in comparison to other .223 autoloaders were all wet.

It wasn't until six years or so ago that I started paying attention to the true accuracy of semiautomatic rifles. I purchased an ArmaLite AR-10T and really began to understand the accuracy potential of self-loaders. It was then that I also understood that the Mini-14 wasn't quite on the level of some of its peers when it came to accuracy at 100 yards. With the ArmaLite and Black Hills Match ammunition, quarter-inch groups at 100 yards were the norm with the 10T. I also have considerable experience with the Les Baer .223 rifles, which shoot quarter-inch groups at 100 yards as well. No doubt about it, that sort of precision becomes addicting.

Such accuracy hasn't been the norm for the Mini-14, but as I mentioned, the little Ranch Rifle wasn't designed for competition shooting. It was designed as a light, handy little carbine that functions every time you pull the trigger. Plus, a Mini-14 costs a fraction of the price of one of the ArmaLite or Les Baer rifles.

The Mini-14 has been reborn. It is now a rock-solid .223 sporting rifle that offers reliability and accuracy.

Wouldn't it be splendid, though, if you could achieve excellent accuracy and maintain the integrity of what the Mini was designed for? Ruger has stepped back and taken a stab at just that.

It's my understanding that previously manufactured Mini-14s, on the whole, average about three- to five-inch groups at 100 yards, or two inches at 50--not big news for accuracy bugs but good enough for plinkers.

Mini-14s manufactured before the 580-series rifles often showed signs of inconsistencies with the gas block, pictured here. The gas block is held together with four screws. The blocks on the new rifles are much more uniform.

There apparently were a number of potential causes for these rather loose groups. William B. Ruger and his engineers designed the Mini-14 to closely resemble a scaled-down version of the M-14 battle rifle, sans the full-auto switch, at least for the civilian version. (Ruger has produced fully automatic versions of the Mini-14 and sold a boatload of them to various governments around the world for both military and police applications. My dad, Skeeter Skelton, accompanied Ruger executives into South and Central America in the 1970s demonstrating the Mini-14 to government officials.)

The Mini-14's gas system was modified from the M-14 and works much more simply, making the smaller rifle quite suited to the smaller cartridge, i.e. .308 Winchester to .223. In all, the M-14 was obviously a combat rifle, and the Mini-14 was really designed as a sporting rifle.

Much concentration has been focused on the Mini's gas block, which is located at the forward side of the fore-end. Held together by four screws, the gas block has an upper and lower piece. When the slide block works forward, its face comes into contact with the gas block. At times, the face of the gas block may not be perfectly flat or symmetrical and causes imbalance in its contact with the slide block. Such a blemish causes inaccuracy.