A heavy 26” or medium weight 28” barrel 308 has nice heft, but can be easily fired offhand. That’s the gun I should be shooting at the range. Or a 7-08 or 6.5 creed/260 Remington, or 243.
I’ve had a lot of fun with a 28” #4 contour 6mm-06. Too much fun, and the barrel will be lucky to last another year. It will definitely be replaced with another and it won’t be shot as much in the future. 28” #4 barrels are easily my favorite and going forward I’ll probably have more calibers in the size. I keep waiting to dig the barrel into the ground or bang against something, but the barrel weight actually moves the center of gravity far enough forward it carries just like a 24” or 26”.
Personally I’d get a receiver that is popular with competitive shooters that use cartridges you’re interested in, like a Bat. The number of inexpensive top quality slightly used barrels will quickly pay for the price of the receiver. When serious shooters change from something like 284 to this years cool cartridge, practice barrels, half worn out barrels, and brand new spare barrels of slightly slow twist can often be had for 10% to 25% of new. Careful, you’ll get a barrel vice and start collecting barrels.
There are a ton of high quality take off custom barrels for savage receivers. I contemplated buying an old savage just to take advantage of the used barrels.
My 284, 6.5-284 are retired competition barrels. A little chonky but quite nice Bartliens for less than $100 each. 6bra becoming more popular all the time for competition use to 600 yards with a twist to drive 105 Bergers or similar. Someone kicked the bucket and I picked up three essentially new 6mm barrels from the estate sale. Non shooting members of his family probably grabbed his bench gun not realizing all the other barrels should have gone with it.
