Welcome to the backcountry hunting podcast. Today I'm sitting down with a pretty cool guy named Aaron Cummins.

He is the product manager for rifles and handguns with Browning.

Welcome to the show, Aaron. Appreciate you being here. Thank you appreciate you coming. You bet. Now am I mistaken or weren't you one of the the

how shall I say a brain children behind the genesis of the X-bolt action?

The development of the X-bolt goes back quite a ways and I was here for part of it.

I worked with one of the engineers and we you know we played with a lot of ideas I can point to at least one of the features saying that that was my idea which was the at the time the acute had just come out on the market there's a lot of discussion on what a good trigger was and I pushed heavily on a three lever trigger to get a good trigger without any extra parts. I believe that rifleman just

want a good trigger and so that was that was where I pushed on that particular

aspect of it but I was involved at the early stages where some of the major design features were set up.

Very cool. As far as that trigger goes, I couldn't agree with you more. I'm a big proponent of that myself. I think a bad trigger can mess you up in the field. Sometimes when you're up against a tight shot window and a fleeting opportunity.

If you have to battle that trigger to get a clean shot executed,

you either run out of time or you can miss because you start

horsepower and through it. And the X-bolt does have a very very good

trigger I remember doing a test several years ago when I was heading up shooting

Times magazine where we took a digital trigger gauge and measured a whole bunch of different rifles in that same price

category as the X-bolt and measured multiple samples of each, so it wasn't just a one you know one piece in each category and the

ex-bolt trigger turned out to be if I'm remember correctly the most

consistent of them all the third third lever uses compound leverage effectively to give

you a good crisp hole without hardly any movement on the trigger at all.

Now other desirable features of the

ex-bolt are that it's quite light as far as modern rifle actions go. If I'm not

mistaken it was that was part of the engineering goal wasn't it?

Yes the action has been trimmed down quite a bit. If you were to pull a barrel and

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