With my rifle freshly boresighted and a clean target hung at 100 yards, I set to zeroing the X-Bolt. In just a couple shots, I had established a consistent zero and began shooting some groups. The smooth stroke of the bolt even when stripping loaded rounds from the magazine was very pleasing.
The all-polymer magazine has a slippery feel to it, surely this aids in the smooth feeding of cartridges. One complaint about the magazine is that it only holds four rounds, for a rifle that plays in the competition realm with the big boys, this is almost a deal breaker. A 10-round or even 12-round magazine would be much better suited for this rifle. But it shot so smooth I could hardly put it down.
The easily operated bolt made loading and reloading the rifle very fast, and I noticed another one of Browning’s very intuitive designs while running it. When the safety is engaged, the bolt is automatically locked. But there is a small button on top of the base of the bolt handle. This button pops up when the safety is engaged. You can depress the button to open or close the bolt while on safe, and the button drops out of the way and the bolt runs with zero inhibition when the safety is in the firing position. This may not be the most fascinating feature of the rifle, but I found it to be very ingenious.
Another engineering bonus I found on the X-Bolt was the mounting of the optics rail. Instead of using four screws (two in the front, and two in the back) like on typical optics rails, the X-Bolt uses eight screws. There are four in the front, and four in the back, giving the X-Bolt a very solid mounting point for your riflescope. Again, this may not be a revolutionary thing, but I can certainly appreciate the engineer’s thinking.