Ruger's American Ranch 450 Bushmaster Revisited Part I

The Ruger American is loaded with features, it is highly accurate and durable, but it is a budget priced firearm. This result was attained through innovative design rather than attempting to cost reduce a more costly product like the Ruger M77 Hawkeye. As an example, rather than attempting a full, close stock to barreled action fit to achieve a stable assembly, Ruger opted to design a V block based Power Bedding® system that delivers a high degree of accuracy without hand fitting and finishing. The action is anchored to the stock at four locations and the barrel is free floating.

The Ruger full body bolt, the outside diameter of the body is the same as the circumference of the three locking lug, results in a smooth bolt stroke and increased strength. A plunger ejector is embedded in the bolt face, the extractor is a spring loaded slide type; both high reliability approaches. The three lug arrangement yields a 70º bolt lift which facilitates low scope mounting.

The American has two cocking cams which reduces effort through increased bearing surface area, greater mechanical advantage and balanced loading on adjacent contact surfaces. No, I have no idea what that means either, but the use of the term “adjacent contact surfaces” sounds pretty exciting. Between the full diameter bolt body and twin cams, the action cycles smoothly and with light effort.

Nothing is for show, it all serves a purpose…

The Ruger Bushmaster Muzzle Brake is a unique design and welcome on a little, light rifle that generates a decent amount of recoil and muzzle blast. The bulk of recoil is generated by jet effect of high velocity, high pressure gases, not inertial effects of a bullet in motion. The Ruger brake is ported and indexed to quickly disperse and slow gases, cutting recoil by approximately 58% and reducing noise to the sides of the shooter. A jam nut makes indexing and removal easy.

The Ruger American Ranch rifle has a barrel flare that increases diameter of the barrel from 0.695″ to 0.825″ to provide stable support for the rifle’s muzzle break. Yes, devices other than a brake can be installed as subsonic Trail Boss powder loads lend themselves to suppression.

The detachable, self-centering poly magazine holds three rounds. With one in the chamber, that’s four shots to hit a deer size animal in a vital area and you won’t look like Johnny Rico fighting off giant insects in Starship Troopers.

The post muzzle side of things…

Some of the reasons I wanted to check out the Ruger American Rifle Ranch on 450 Bushmaster for a second time were the addition of the brake, a Barnes component bullet specified for the 450 Bushmaster and a new Hornady ammunition release. The first time around Hornady offered only their  450 Bushmaster and I was limited to using 0.452″ sabot bullets intended for muzzle loader applications for handloads. The sabot bullets worked great, but definitely the long way around.

I am a little puzzled by the existence of Hornady 450 Bushmaster 250 grain FTX ammunition and Hornady 450 Bushmaster 250 grain FTX Black ammunition. They share common exterior ballistics, they utilize common components including bullet type and weight, only one is packaged in a black box. Video gamers edition? In any event, rated at 2,200 fps, the Hornady Black shot 2187 fps, 10 feet from the muzzle and over the chronograph, for 2,656 ft/lbs of kinetic energy.

Accuracy for the Hornady factory ammo was all Sub-MOA. Utilizing spire tip bullets intended for rifle applications it is difficult to not shoot as well with the Ruger’s American’s quick 1:16″ rifling. Good little rifle, lots of power, great accuracy. We’ll be back in Part II with some further handload data, but in the mean time you may want to check out the earlier “Ruger’s American Rifle 450 Bushmaster Part 2“