Walking through a jungle of booths at a wholesaler's show this past fall, a familiar voice caught my attention over the crowd noise. It was Bill Dermody, marketing manager for Savage Arms, and he was grinning ear to ear. He grabbed me by the shirt collar and practically dragged me into the Savage booth.

The reason for all this excitement sat on a table in the middle of the floor, directly under one of the can lights in the convention center's ceiling, giving it an air of the heavenly ordained. It was big, black, and bad, and I was curious why Dermody had another company's rifle in the Savage booth. Dermody had started the job one year before and had a reputation for shaking things up, but this was the kind of stunt that could get you unemployed.

"My friend, that is certainly not your daddy's Savage," he said. It was not my daddy's Savage for sure, but despite the radical looks, it was a Savage rifle.

Indeed, the Savage Bolt Action Sniper (BAS) and its Bolt Action Target/Sniper (BAT/S) variation scarcely look as though they rolled out of the storied Westfield, Massachusetts, plant that has been producing one of America's most accurate and inexpensive factory bolt-action rifles for more than 50 years. The familiar Model 10 action was paired with a heavy, fluted bull barrel affixed with an aggressive muzzle brake. A monster Picatinny rail crawled down the receiver and across half the length of the barrel--two additional railed sections sat opposite one another ahead of the ejection port. There was not an iota of wood, polymer, or plastic to be found on the stock; it was all machined aluminum. A detachable-box magazine sat ahead of an AR-style pistol grip, and an any-which-way-you-want-it target stock completed the package.

After having looked over the rifle for five minutes, the shock wore off, and I realized my surprise was misplaced. In the past few years, Savage had undergone a renaissance, taking advantage of the Model 10's inherent abilities and focusing the tremendous manufacturing capabilities at hand to produce some fantastic new rifles. No other major firearms manufacturer produces an off-the-shelf F-Class rifle, chambers custom cartridges like 6.5-284 Norma, or offers varmint shooters multiple twist rates for the same caliber. While the Precision Target and Predator series rifles were a step ahead of the competition, the BAS and BAT/S variation raise the bar even more. I posed the obvious question to Dermody, "Why?"

"We build some of the most accurate factory rifles in the world, and the military, law enforcement, and civilian shooters want precision rifles," Dermody said. "Black rifles are all the rage, but we don't build AR-15s. We are a bolt-gun company. So we pulled bits and pieces from the black-gun world and put them in a bolt gun that really shoots."

The BAS Up Close
The BAT/S variation arrived a month later. I laid it on my desk and called Dan Borecki, a product design engineer at Savage, who helped turn an idea on paper into a rifle that works. Borecki explained that each week, engineers, salesmen, and marketing guys sit down and talk about what the company should build next and how they will build it, often taking their cues from custom-gun builders. Such meetings are where the AccuTrigger, the Predator rifle, and the Model 12 F-Class rifles were born.

"This rifle had to look bad, unlike anything we had produced before, but still perform," Borecki said. "It had to incorporate AR-15 components and have the ability to change. The obvious answer was a modular system."