It made me rethink all of the things we do to try and squeeze some accuracy out of the gas guns. I think a good barrel and bolt with straight receivers are capable of more than enough accuracy. Or maybe I just got lucky twice.
My anecdotal experience has kinda led me down the same path. When I first putting AR's together with intentions on making them more accurate I didn't even think about bedding, I was running a WOA barrel, in a standard M4 receiver, a good 2-stage trigger, and running a standard FA BCG. Decent factory match was yielding sub-MOA and that worked for me out to 600 yards. Last year I started doing some parts swaps and logged the data to see if there were any improvements and generally all the configurations shot the same with decent factory match ammo. 16" WOA in a BCM thermofit upper was sub-MOA, an 18" WOA barrel in a bedded Vltor upper was sub-MOA, same 16" barrel in bedded in the Vltor was the same, and same goes for the 18" WOA in the BCM upper. This also includes swapping optics between the configurations and using different handguards so it's not like one really had a leg up on the other one either.
I believe also that a good barrel, good ammunition, and good technique are going to contribute more to accuracy than bedding. My two accuracy focused AR's are bedded, it didn't seem to hurt anything but also doesn't seem to have drastically improved accuracy.
www.19fortyfive.com
