One rifle, four interchangeable barrels for four different rimfires and a special Burris scope to handle them all.
By Wayne van Zwoll
An increasing assortment of ammo is available to rimfire shooters. The Quad digests virtually all.
Bolt-action rifles have a mechanical integrity that makes barrel-switching a challenge. They hardly lend themselves to the routine tube changes of a competition skeet gun, nor are justifications for accessory rifle barrels as compelling.
A four-barrel skeet set allows you to participate fully in the sport with a firearm whose stock fit figures heavily in your score. It also saves you money. Unless your tax-refund check is bigger than mine, you'll forego many hunts to equip yourself with a quartet of custom-stocked Perazzis. And shotguns don't have to shoot to exactly the same spot. Riflemen may not insist on perfect stock fit, but top-level intrinsic accuracy is expected.
Designing a rifle that comes apart easily but contains 65,000 psi and shoots to the same point of aim, one barrel to another, is a task that drives talented engineers to evenings of reality TV.
Still, the idea of owning one rifle that shoots multiple cartridges is as old as the European drilling. When Paul Mauser developed his Model 1898 bolt rifle, hinged-breech guns with clusters of barrels lost some of their appeal. Bolt rifles were lighter and more accurate, held more cartridges and bottled higher pressures. While you couldn't combine a shotgun and a rifle in one mechanism, you could stack different loads in the magazine--follow a softpoint with a solid, for example, when hunting dangerous game.
Four cartridges, four barrels: Sako’s Quad is the most versatile rimfire rifle available.
There must have been a few hunters who thought turning a big-game gun into a varmint rifle had more merit than buying another rifle because Remington answered some years ago with Accelerator loads--.30-30 and .30-06 cartridges launching 55-grain .224 spitzers in plastic sabot sleeves. These earned some credibility as varmint rounds and are still offered. But few enthusiasts spending June weekends in prairie-dog towns favor Accelerator ammunition in deer guns. They own varmint rifles.
Equipping pet whitetail hardware with a barrel that could use, say, .22-250 ammo instead of Accelerator .30-06s might get some attention from this crowd because a shooter would have many more load options, from the factory and from the bench. A different barrel means you can also install a longer barrel and, within limits imposed by the fore-end, a heavier one. Switch stocks, and you can hang varmint-weight barrels on mountain rifles.
A Teutonic try at multiple-barrel versatility on one platform appeared in Blaser straight-pull bolt rifles. These, with the new Mauser from Sig-Sauer, follow the work of custom 'smiths who, over decades, have fashioned switch-barrel guns from such common cloth as the Remington 700.
In truth, I marvel that anyone with a yen to shoot different ammunition would pass up the chance to buy another complete rifle. At least, I did until a Quad popped up last fall at the Bisley range in England.
The Quad is not English. Nor is it, as one amigo queried, "one of them knobby-tired bog-jumpers that drive elk out of the meadows before real hunters get there."
The Quad is a switch-barrel bolt-action rimfire rifle introduced this year by Sako to replace its .22 Finnfire bolt gun. You can buy the Quad with just one barrel, in .22 Long Rifle, .22 WMR, .17 Mach 2 or .17 HMR. If all you want is one rimfire rifle, you can spend less (though you won't get Sako quality on the cheap). Versatility is the Quad's main selling point. You can buy the Quad packaged in a metal case with all four barrels. And barrels are interchanged in 20 seconds.
$948 with one barrel, four-barrel combination $1,739
Well, that's what the literature claimed. Twenty seconds, "and this having never done it before!" I tested the boast with a friend, Brian Kelly, who'd not worked with the Quad. He changed from .22 Long Rifle to .17 HMR in a timed 19 seconds.
My introduction to the Quad gave me a chance to shoot it with very good ammunition. At Bisley in the U.K., some colleagues and I were shooting Eley .22 Tenex Ultimate EPS, cartridges still inspected individually. They're used by the world's best shooters in Olympic competition. My modest successes on the smallbore circuit hinged largely on the performance of Eley; from a good barrel it would drill five-shot groups tight enough to grab a .243 bullet. If the Quad was accurate, it would shoot well with Eley.
It did. My first five-shot group with Eley .17 Mach 2 ammo on a target just shy of the 25-yard line was small enough to cover (all but tears) with the base of a .17 cartridge--one hole, and not a very big one.
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