The Steyr Scout: Jeff Cooper's Modern Day Frontier Rifle

hi guys thanks for tuning in to another video on Forgotten weapons comm I'm Ian McCullen and I'm here today at the Rock Island auction house taking a look at some of the guns that they are going to be selling in their upcoming June of 2017 regional option and today we're going to take a look at a steyr scout rifle now this rifle is the final manifestation of a concept that was really promoted by a guy named Colonel Jeff Cooper now Cooper's name ought to be familiar to serious shooters he is basically the father of modern combative pistol shooting he was also a very serious hunter worldwide hunter Africa North America everywhere and an all-around gun guy in every sense of the word and in starting in 1985 he really started promoting this concept of what he called a scout rifle the idea was it was a rifle that was meant to be fast accurate handy lightweight rugged versatile it was supposed to accomplish or meet the needs of someone who is traveling alone in the wilderness and might need to shoot anything from small game to dangerous game now this is really optimized more for animals than for humans to continue on some of what Cooper came up with as the the criteria for a proper scout rifle by his definition and again this is a concept that he is creating and defining he wanted the rifle to be no more than 1 metre in length wanted it to weigh no more than 3 kilograms that would be 66.6 pounds and this is because this is a rifle they get carried a lot and shot occasionally and so it's handiness is actually a really important criteria to it in terms of practical effectiveness his criteria was that it needed to be able to take down a 200 kilogram animal so about 450 pounds in that it needed to be able to do that basically to any range within the skill of the shooter and that's kind of interpreted as 300 to 400 yards or meters now Cooper began by experimenting with a lot of different existing actions to try and come up with an ideal manifestation of this rifle and ultimately in the early 90s he actually was able to convince the management at steyr mannlicher that this was an interesting project that could have commercial legs and stired decided to build a rifle to his scout rifle specifications and this is the result unveiled in 1997 or early 98 they're still on the market today they're still available and the tricky part about this is that is I think properly understanding the purpose and the concept behind it so most of the the rifle purchases that are made today at least in the United States are for recreation or competition or self-defense and negatives I mean self-defense against people and none of those things is really what the Steyr scout is designed for the Steiner scout are in fact the Scout concept I would say has much more income in common with something like this a winchester model 94 in 3030 this was a quintessential frontiersman trifle you could shoot pretty much anything with it effectively you had a substantial capacity of ammunition it was a repeating rifle quick follow-up shots sights that were appropriate for could be used at close range could also be used at longer range a cartridge that was effective enough to take down pretty much anything you're going to run into is it a buffalo rifle no if you had to shoot a buffalo because that was the only food available could you with a 94 yeah absolutely you could the Steiner Scout is that concept but modernized and I think it is a lot to Cooper's hunting experiences in Africa and for these reasons it's not something that makes necessarily a lot of sense for the typical American gun buyer who isn't really an avid hunter certainly not as much as was the case fifty or a hundred years ago in the United States so the foundation of this rifle is the Steyr SBS bolt-action system it's a rotating bolt manually operated rifle now a couple things that are useful for this specific system are the bolt head locks into the barrel extension meaning that there is never any pressure on the receiver similar to an ar-15 in that particular way that allowed steyr to use an aluminum receiver on the Scout which helped reduce its weight substantially the furniture is pretty much all zytle or polymer which also helps reduce weight it has a light weight profile 19 inch barrel the end here is fluted specifically to continue reducing weight weight was a big element on these rifles it's one of those things where you have to pay attention to it at every opportunity or else you won't make a weight goal grains make ounces and ounces make pounds if you don't pay attention to the ounces you'll end up with way too many pounds on the rifle one of Cooper's requirements for the concept was to be able to reload rapidly if necessary and that gets interpreted as being either detachable magazines or stripper clips the Skylar Scout does not accept stripper clips but it does have quick detach magazines five round mags and there is one in the rifle and then there is actually also one in storage in the buck stock so you have two mags on the rifle at all times which is pretty cool one of the other features of the Steyr Scout that I find fascinating I think this is just really cool because it really harkens back to some of the guns that I look at more often is that this actually has a magazine disconnect if you look closely at the magazine catch you'll see that there are two hooks on all of the catches that is so that you can actually put the magazine in at this position we're still protruding slightly out of the receiver and at this point bolt will not pick up a cartridge from the magazine which means you can keep a loaded magazine in reserve and single load cartridges through the ejection port to shoot when you decide that you need the magazine all you have to do is push it the rest of the way in you don't have to use the locking catches at all because those tabs are angled from this position it's just a little bit of force and then you have five rounds available for rapid-fire shooting I mean that just harkens straight back to rifles of a hundred years ago or more the early bolt-action repeating right we're all set up with magazine disconnects for exactly the same reason and I find it fascinating that Cooper Cooper and steyr decided to bring that feature back on this rifle one of the other features of the Steyr scout is an integral bipod that folds up into the stock on the scout rifle concept in general as purported by Cooper this was kind of a luxury item because there basically was basically impossible to add iPod to an existing rifle system without way exceeding the weight limit but by making this from scratch Dyer was able to do that so to deploy the bipod you have a button here push that in and then you have to thin iPod legs these are all polymer and they fold out like so they are wobbly well they have Piven here but the legs themselves have some flex they are widely criticized as being far too flimsy but I think this is one of those instances where people are attempting to judge a sporting rifle or an outdoorsman's rifle by military standards this isn't something that that is going to this wouldn't live up to a military you know severe trial but it's not intended to this is a utilitarian bipod it folds up completely out of the way it weighs basically nothing and it's there if you need it for an extra long shot something I do want to point out on this because I think people who have these rifles or who are considering these rifles will be curious about it there is no locking catch it's just held open by a spring detent so to close this you do just grab it and pull and it makes a really nerve-wracking snap when you do that but that is in fact the proper way to close the bipod so don't worry about it that's how it's supposed to be there is also by the way a rail under here if you wanted to put on a bipod or if you wanted to put on a shooting sling attachment of some sort you can do that on that rail all right and one of the other really iconic elements to the Steyr Scout is the use of a long eye relief scope this is a loop hold m8 it's a two and a half power magnified that has this long eye relief so a standard cheek weld on the rifle back here gives you proper eye relief to use this scope and there's been a lot of the casual viewer will look at the scout rifle and and the only thing that they'll take away from it is I uses a long eye relief scope therefore anything that I stick a long eye relief scope on becomes a scout rifle and that's not really the case and there are some specific reasons to use a scope like this and some of them are obvious and some are a little less obvious so the concept called for a low-power magnified optic because you wanted to retain a wide field of view and you wanted to retain peripheral vision and this I think is one of those elements that is really based on Cooper's African experience if you're hunting if you're tracking something or stalking something through through brush you don't want to have your eye focus right up on a magnified optic to the detriment of your peripheral vision you want to know if you go around the corner of a bush and there's some large angry animal right there that's going to jump on you and that's one of the places where the long eye relief optic is particularly good because you can shoot this legitimately despite the fact that it's magnified with both eyes open and you can really actually remain aware of what's going on around you the placement of the optic is also ideal for stripper clips which was important to Cooper's concept although not specifically to the stired moniker interpretation of it this rifle does not use stripper clips but if you are building a scout rifle type of gun on a military platform that did use Clips having a scope mounted over the action prevents you from using stripper clips and a long high relief scope does not and then one of the most subtle rationales behind this I think is that the balance point of the rifle is here at the action and with a long eye relief scope you can grab and carry this right at the balance point without interference from the scope and I think that was something that Cooper placed a lot more emphasis on than a lot of the people who are assessing the rifle today from the outside so all of those things put together are why they went with the long eye relief you will note that when steyr built this rifle they did include a Picatinny section very small one but enough for a scope ring back here behind the action so that if you get one of these rifles and decide you want a traditional scope you can mount a traditional scope instead of a long high relief one now a couple of the more mundane features of the rifle of course it has a good trigger you would expect that from a $2,600 which by the way was the retail package price of the gun the original triggers apparently were like two and a half to three pounds the production ones tended to be apparently three and a half to four but it's a really nice crisp trigger far better than you would get building a scout rifle from a military surplus action the buttpad has two removable spacers in it so you can use one or both or none and change the length of pole to whatever you prefer the safety force tires SBS design is it's a three position system the red dot means it's ready to fire you can roll this back to the white dot the white dot is safe but the bolt can be operated so this allows you to put the rifle on safe and then manipulate a cartridge in the chamber without it firing or you can roll it all the way back and this tab pops up that completely locks the rifle so the trigger trigger is disconnected and bolt is locked in position and in order to take it out of this safe position you have to actually depress that button and then roll the safety forward and lastly the sling swivel attachments are removable and they are mounted on both sides of the rifle so to take this sling loop off you just push it in and rotate 90 degrees and it comes out like this and then you can either put it in a drawer if you don't want to use all three of them on the rifle at once and thus be karin teed to lose it or mount it back on the gun now the astute viewer will have noticed that there are three sling swivels on this rifle and that's because this scout rifle package included a chain sling and I'll tell you what this is getting long so we will address the chain sling in a separate video all by itself so that we can give it the appropriate detail that it deserves so despite the interest in and the prevalence of long eye relief scopes Cooper did not consider an optical sight to actually be a necessary component of the scout rifle concept iron sights would work his preference was definitely forego string aperture type iron sights and steyr in fact has integrated backup iron sights onto this rifle so there is a little folding aperture rear sight back here cartridge tip would be the ideal tool to use to raise that that's it it is not windage of adjustable but there is a little tiny screw right there and you can actually zero this for elevation which is a good thing and then there is a folding front sight to match however the optic on this particular rifle is slightly longer than the front sight so normally you would depress this and the front sight pops up here in this case it's being held down by the scope so as long as the scopes on there of course you don't really need backup iron sights I continue to find the scout rifle to be a really interesting concept and I really liked Stiers interpretation of it one of the big problems of course is finding a set of circumstances of venue in which to actually use it in the role it was intended to be used short of fly it buying a plane ticket to Africa or inventing a time machine that will take me back a hundred years I'll tell you what a hundred years ago on the western frontier this would have been a pretty darn compelling rifle would have been crazy looking but functionally very compelling and that's that's a situation we just don't really have here in the United States anymore but there are people who do go hunting general-purpose in Africa there are people who live in areas that are legitimately still frontier like rural Alaska is an excellent example probably one of not very many excellent examples but there are places in the Mountain West and in Alaska where something like this I think still definitely does have very practical application so if you're interested in this one it is actually a kind of unusual example in that it is chambered for the seven millimeter Oh 8 cartridge which was not offered commercially in the US this was a European Edition of the rifle for those countries where military cartridges like the 760 NATO we're not allowed to be owned by civilians so steyr did release it in Europe in 708 and one of those has ended up here in the United States that's what this one is if you take a look in the description below you'll find a link to rock island's catalog page on this one so you can take a look at their description and pictures and price estimate and if it's something you'd like to add to your own collection and place a bit over the phone or through their website and good luck thanks for watching

Channel: Forgotten Weapons

Views: 1,305,911

Rating: 4.956285 out of 5

Keywords: steyr scout, scout rifle, jeff cooper, col cooper, colonal cooper, cooper scout, steyr, 308, 7.62 nato, hunting rifle, african plains rifle, scout scope, leupold, m8, leupold m8, pistol scope, long eye relief, folding bipod, 7mm-08, cooper package, ching sling, shooting sling, frontier rifle, general purpose rifle, bolt action, history, development, mccollum, kasarda, inrange, inrangetv, forgotten weapons, modern rifle, 376 steyr, lion scout, schmidt scout, csgo, counterstrike

Id: qucXL7GzoVg

Length: 16min 48sec (1008 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 18 2017