Welcome to the flagship review blog for KeepingMyPowderDry! This week’s firearm topic will be an initial review of the Savage 110 Apex Hunter XP chambered in .223 Remington.
While many of the precision shooters and outdoorsmen on the net enjoy a carnal love affair with their 6.5 Creedmoors and thirty- caliber ladies of the night, I was on the hunt for a different flavor of firearm that was both comfortable on the shoulder and had available ammunition in this Covid-torn ammunition market. My wife had a significant birthday approaching, which I will leave vague as she is armed now and I’d rather not die with more holes than I was born with, and I felt that it was time that she had her very own rifle. The last thing I would do is put her on a gun that she would shy away from shooting consistently due to recoil or give her a firearm that I could not reliably find ammunition for (which I have found to be many of the most popular chamberings for bolt action rifles). At the time of this writing, I had only consistently found .223/5.56, 308/7.62, and 40 S&W in my local gun stores.
Those two factors led me down the road of many .223 caliber firearms. Now, while this controversial and frankly dangerous age we live in would lend some to ask “why not build/buy an AR?”. A valid point to make and it was exactly the plan I had for my wife after I had completed my own AR-15 build in 2019. I believe, as men of deep thought, we always imagine some post-apocalyptic world full of cannibal marauders and rabid congressional lobbyists scratching at our front gates gibbering for the blood of our children and as such, our parameters for “practical” tend to lean towards “tactical” more often than not. We want our ladies to be armed similarly to us with a similar ability and similar drive to practice.
But, unfortunately my fellow Road Warriors, this is not the case in a lot of households. I have seen some prodigious female shooters (my mother is one of them) out there who make my own humble shot groupings look like birdshot on the side of a metal shed. But those women aren’t the majority.
My wife is not going to be standing on the roof of my home with a smoking AR-15 in one bloodied fist while balancing a baby on her hip with the other, shooting death into a crowd of zombie politicians with gun registries in their hands. It’s attractive in a Red Sonja sort of way, but it’s not reality. Now, can she consistently pull her 9mm and hit a man-sized target at 7-10 yards center mass? Absolutely. It’s practical and it gives me the security of knowing she can protect herself and my children in a dire situation. I also wanted her to be able to put a reasonably acceptable group on a man/deer/coyote sized target at an “ethical” distance without flinching from the trigger.
So, a bolt action rifle in .223 Remington it was. Now, the biggest hurdle to face. My wife is a left-handed shooter. Between my father and I, we had to have called or visited over seven to eight gun/sporting goods stores and combed through three times as many websites looking for a left-handed bolt action. As many of you know, the firearms market has taken a massive hit recently with the perfect storm that has been 2020-2021. While bolt action rifles are scarce right now, left-handed bolt action rifles in .223 Remington are nearly EXTINCT it seems. However, right about the time I was giving up hope, I happened across a website called Classic Firearms and sure enough, I found a left-handed Savage in .223 Remington. I wasted no time and was able to reserve it before some other poor left-hander could claim it for his own selfish purposes.
So, lets begin the review. The Savage Apex Hunter XP is on the “lower end” of the Savage 110 line and comes with a mounted and bore-sighted Vortex Crossfire II 3×9 scope. The marketing ploy here is that ideally, a hunter/shooter could take the rifle home from the gunstore, open the box and head to the mountains/range. Now, while the gun is bore-sighted, its definitely in need of zeroing before taking aim at anything with a pulse. It comes with Savage’s celebrated Accutrigger and adjustable Accustock which have helped reinvigorate the Savage line.
Now, my first rifle was a Savage 110 that was chambered in .243 Winchester and that was before the onset of “Accu” years. Synthetic stock, simple trigger, no frills. I’m a simple man with simple tastes so I have never been one to want more moving parts on a rifle than necessary. Well, after feeling this Accutrigger, I have slowly began to change my point of view on adjustable triggers. The trigger pull is light and the break is clean and crisp which is everything you can ask from a new rifle.
The stock has an admittedly “light” feel bordering on “cheap” but I have felt similarly about other budget bolt guns with light stocks in the recent years. It’s comfortable on the shoulder, easy to hold and easy to grip. It feels ergonomic, so much that you feel you can ease yourself into the cheek rest instead of onto it. The butt pad assembly was easy and it comes with multiple shims for adjusting the length of pull which can be trial and error to find the right fit.
The barrel is free-floated from the stock and it’s at this point of contact where my only negative comment will be focused. Looking down from above at the top of the barrel, you can easily spot that the spacing between barrel and stock is much thinner than the left, bordering on non-existent. Now some home gunsmithing with a file and a lot of patience and restraint can easily touch that part of the gun up to satisfaction but it is still disappointing considering the rifle’s price point and new-in-box condition. Step it up on that frontier, Savage.
The magazine is detachable and can fit five cartridges in the chambering listed above; I know other rifles have less room depending on caliber. The magazine sits flush and tight, no complaints there at all. The bolt cycles rounds through without any trouble but you do have to throw a little more effort behind it for a smooth open and close as it’s a little stiff out of the box. My wife learned this the hard way as she tended to baby the bolt and had trouble rechambering as a result. The bolt face was clean, which I have seen being a problem with Savage recently, and it took three men, seven hands and exactly four glasses of whiskey to remove the bolt from the rifle successfully. So fear not dear reader, it can be done without breaking the stock. One thing to mention as another negative point from my perspective, is the plastic trigger guard. Call me a traditionalist but I would prefer my trigger guards to be steel as I can be clumsy at times. However, polymer rifle components are on the rise and most pistols these days are composed of polymer in place of steel, so that concern may be unfounded.
The barrel is a sporter contour that is 20 inches in length with a 1:9 twist rate and came without any obvious blemishes or tooling marks. The whole rifle weighed just over seven and a half pounds and with the light stock and shorter barrel, it was easy to maneuver even in dense mesquite foliage without trouble.
The rifle grouped consistently to the right and low during the initial several rounds of 76 grain boat tail hollow points but with several hot walks back and forth between the bench and target, we were able to get the grouping to “minute of deer” quite easily.
Something worth mentioning, even with different shooters, we noticed that our groups tightened considerably when we switched to 62 grain rounds which were just some boat tail FMJ .223 that I had pulled from my pre-Covid supply cache. My brother-in-law who spent seven years as a SWAT sniper in California even took his turn behind the gun and shot a respectable group from a rickety uneven bench and tactical bag for a rest.
We cut the range time short as we had a family engagement to attend but I was pretty confident that we had sighted the rifle close enough to a workable zero that we could tighten things up at a later date. I did not get into the specifics of the scope as I feel that is review onto itself and I tend to become long winded when I’m on a keyboard. Also, when my wife and I find a clear schedule, a stable bench rest with sandbags, and a few more boxes of ammo, I will post a full breakdown of the rifle’s performance using different weights and bullet constructions with more concise pictures.
I found the Savage 110 Apex Hunter XP to be a simple, lightweight rifle that was comfortable to shoot, worked without any chambering problems (that weren’t the fault of the shooter), and was accurate for the practical application that I bought it for. I wouldn’t call this gun a precision long range rifle or even the best tool for hunting in conditions that require long shots regularly. But for a hunting rifle that younger/newer shooters can afford that comes with mounted glass, I feel this would be more than adequate for killing whitetail deer, hogs and coyotes with the right shooter and right ammunition.
The most important part of it for me was the smile on my wife’s face after every shot working a left-handed bolt.
Keeping My Powder Dry 