Kenny Jarrett 257 Weatherby

A vast field of soybeans, stretching away under the southern sun, may seem a strange image to attach to an ultra-accurate rifle, but 40 years ago, it was about the highest accolade one could bestow.

A “beanfield rifle,” specifically one made by Kenny Jarrett, was the ultimate, the ne plus ultra of precision hunting implements, designed for one purpose and one purpose only: Dispatching big whitetail bucks on the far edge of a soybean field – 300, 350, even 400 yards out.

Compared to today’s long-range rifles - or at least the claims made for them - this may seem modest. But in 1990, the whole idea was outlandish. Shooting and hunting editors demanded proof, and Kenny Jarrett, a denizen of Jackson, South Carolina, who lived and worked on a huge farm with both soybeans and whitetails, was happy to oblige.

Kenny - no one ever calls him anything but Kenny – may exude good ol’ boy manners and down-home vibes, but he is many things in the rifle world, all of them good. He’s a deer hunter, handloader, benchrest shooter, and rifle maker, all rolled into one. He put all that experience into refining custom rifles that would, above all else, deliver the goods way over yonder where the big bucks lurked.

A typical Jarrett beanfield rifle started with a reworked Remington Model 700 action, rebarreled in Kenny’s shop, polished and tuned and bedded until it would put three shots into half an inch or less – a half inch, guaranteed, with sample targets to prove it. It had a fiberglass stock, which was radical at the time, fitted with a piece of German glass to rival an astral telescope.

Jarrett’s rifles were not pretty. In fact, some of them were downright homely since fiberglass stocks in those early days almost took pride in their own ugliness, and mounts for 30mm tubes – again, radical back then - looked like a fitting of a farm tractor. The thing is, they worked.

Kenny Jarrett’s accuracy guarantees were airtight, but they came with some caveats. The main one was that they would only fulfill the guarantee using the handload developed for that specific rifle in Kenny’s shop. If you weren’t a handloader yourself, Kenny would then supply you with custom ammunition. In fact, he preferred it that way because, as he once told me, “a lot of guys just don’t know how to handload.”

He might have added that a lot of guys don’t shoot well enough to take full advantage of such accuracy, either, and years later he admitted he was sorry he ever established that benchmark, what with the headaches that ensued. Regardless, the half-inch guarantee lives on, 35 years later, with a lot of other makers now claiming it – again, with many provisos.

Kenny’s preferred bullet was the Nosler Ballistic Tip, new at the time but gaining a reputation as one of the most accurate hunting bullets around, even if it was not the most dependable when it came to penetration. However, a whitetail does not demand all that much in the way of penetration. It’s not a Cape buffalo.

That, then, was the formula for a Jarrett beanfield rifle, and there was a photograph that appeared just about everywhere showing Kenny, grinning through his unruly beard, holding out two halves of a rifle he’d built and later sawn in two because it obstinately refused to shoot to his standards. His message to his own rifles: Perform or die.

At the SHOT Show in 1996, a mutual friend told me Kenny wanted me to come over and see his rifles, and maybe make one for me to hunt with and, hopefully, write about. As shooting editor of Gray’s Sporting Journal, Kenny figured our readers, with the highest average income in the magazine world, were the types who could afford his masterpieces, which then cost several thousand dollars.

I was more than happy to oblige but had a few conditions of my own. After all, he’d come to me.

First of all, I did not want a Model 700 action. This was partly because of its safety mechanism and partly its lack of controlled feed. There is no way to feed a cartridge silently into the chamber with a push-feed action such as the 700 or the Weatherby Mark V, and that mattered in my kind of hunting. The second and more important reason was that I insist on a three-position safety that locks the striker as well as the bolt, not just blocks the trigger.

Winchester had recently come out with the reincarnation of the pre-’64 Model 70 – what I referred to as the “post-’93 pre-’64” – and I wanted Kenny to use one of these. If he was as good as they said, I argued, he should be able to true one up as well as a 700. He gulped but agreed.

Then there was the matter of the chambering. His 300 Jarrett, a belted wildcat that’s nothing more nor less than a 300 Weatherby minus the double radiused shoulder, was his preference. I’m a great admirer of the 300 Weatherby – I think it’s Roy Weatherby’s finest creation – and Kenny’s 300 Jarrett would have been equally good, but what I wanted was a 257 Weatherby.

Then as now, I think the 257 was Roy Weatherby’s second-best creation. I used a safari-grade custom 257 Weatherby in Africa six years earlier, shooting prototype 115-grain Trophy Bonded Bear Claws, and it performed superbly.

However, later that same year, pursuing mule deer in Montana, the rifle fired as I closed the bolt,  instilling a distrust I was never able to overcome.

We later figured its sojourns in such arid spots as Botswana and Montana had caused the wood to shrink so that, when the rear guard screw was tightened, it protruded just enough to cause the striker to ride over the sear. Lovely as the rifle was, I was not heart-broken when it fell victim to a divorce. Still, I loved the 257 Weatherby cartridge, wanted another, and here was the chance to get one.

Another gulp from Kenny, another rueful nod. He drew the line at using Bear Claws, though; how about Sierra GameKings?  As it turned out, this was a fortunate decision. Federal abandoned the .257-calibre Bear Claw shortly after it acquired Trophy Bonded a couple of years later. This is not to say it would not have shot beautifully with any number of other accurate bullets. It has and does.

Assembling the wherewithal took a little doing. New Winchester actions were not available to just anybody, and we had to buy a factory rifle to obtain one. I organized a scope from Swarovski. Kenny would make the barrel, of course, and a functional black fiberglass stock from Bell & Carlson completed the outfit.

Six months later, in the heat of summer, I drove down to South Carolina to try it out.

At first glance, it was hard to tell if Jarrett’s place was a working farm that happened to have a large population of whitetails or one that just operated as a vast deer feeder. Everywhere you looked, it seemed there was a deer stand and dusty roads wound through the woods that flanked the crops.

At the end of one such road was Kenny’s elaborate 1,000-yard range with concrete benches, chronographs and a separate building filled with the loading equipment.

The temperature was nudging a hundred when I arrived and heat waves shimmered the length of the range. Because the rifle was chambered for a factory cartridge, and the barrel was so marked, I wanted to see what it would do with Weatherby’s own ammunition, which I knew to be both hot and very accurate. I set up a chronograph and target and went to work.

The 87-grain stuff planted little cloverleaves in the paper, but the chronograph read something over 4,000 feet per second (fps). Huh?  There must be something wrong. The 100-grain, rated at 3,500 fps, recorded a velocity of more than 3,800. More cloverleaves. Finally, the 115-grain roundnose stuff. One shot, then two, then three. All of them blew their primers and left the primer pockets as gaping chasms.

To compress the next few hours into a paragraph, it turned out that Kenny always bored his barrels two or three thousandths under standard specs, finding that this made for better accuracy. Of course, it also pushed up both velocity and pressure, and with the long, heavy 115-grain bullets, pressures went way over the top.

Kenny’s handload for the rifle was perfectly good, of course, and met his accuracy criteria perfectly. The problem was, as we discussed, the rifle said it was a 257 Weatherby. Eventually it would pass from my hands to another’s, as guns inevitably do. It simply had to shoot factory ammunition safely. He removed the barrel, expanded the freebore in the chamber, and started over, testing everything.

What with one thing and another, I did not see the rifle again for close on two years. (I was living in Canada, and even before 9/11, import/export regulations were changing.)

Anyway, I finally got it, complete with three targets with three tight cloverleaf groups, load data and a long, detailed letter of explanation. To be on the safe side, I tried factory ammunition. The 115-grain roundnose didn’t blow every primer but still left most primer pockets enlarged. Oh, well.

Kenny also made early use of muzzle brakes, and the rifle came equipped with one which was detachable, as well as a cap to protect the threads. I put the cap on and, somewhere along the line, misplaced the brake. Another “oh, well.”  I have a profound mistrust of brakes anyway, the 257 Weatherby does not have enough recoil to warrant one, and I value my hearing.

The big question, of course, is will it shoot to Kenny Jarrett’s accuracy guarantee?  The short answer is ‘yes,’ and the longer answer is ‘but not with everything.’

We have a policy at Wolfe Publishing that we do not publish loads that are not within the pressure limits as published in recognized loading manuals or has not been pressure tested, which means I can’t tell you what every load was. Nor can I tell you how the rifle performed with my carefully constructed handload for the original safari-grade Weatherby, nor any subsequent loads that, shall we say, pushed the envelope?

The load Kenny developed is shown first in the accompanying table. It exceeds the maximum in some manuals but not in others, so it’s within safe limits.

The good news, however, is that the rifle will outperform just about anything, and it will do so with some mild loads - if any 257 Weatherby load can be called mild - from any number of manuals. Some of my favorites are in the accompanying chart. In fact, I have yet to find a load it won’t shoot; not all will be three shots into a half inch, but most will plant five shots into an inch without breathing hard.

As I’ve gotten older, I have become less eager to find loads that are really fast, really loud, or which pop primers left and right. Fortunately, the rifle likes modest loads as well as it does hot ones, and no deer is going to tell the difference between 3,500 fps and 3,350 fps.

Much water has flowed under the bridge since Kenny made that rifle. As the quality of Model 700 actions deteriorated, he designed his own action and invested heavily in CNC machinery to make it; he expanded his models to include some with walnut stocks and some - stalking rifles - using the post-’93 pre-’64 Model 70. Kenny has since handed the business on to his children.

Jarrett Rifles now has a website promoting a range of products (JarrettRifles.com), but it’s still in Jackson, South Carolina, and the Jarrett name is still synonymous with accuracy - the originator of the “beanfield rifle.”  My Jarrett 257 Weatherby’s main role now is a yardstick against which to measure new products, including the super-accurate ones. And guess what?  It seldom loses.